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1Martha and William had a number of things in common—her father was a Harvard graduate and a doctor who had made her earn her allowance by memorizing poetry—Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” was fifty cents, Milton’s “Ii Penseroso” was seventy-five cents. She was a bright child, and as with William, books had been her dearest companions. She had attended Boston University for two years but never graduated; her passions lay elsewhere, in writing and politics. (She was later to devote herself to literary pursuits—founding Story magazine and a well-known series of anthologies, Best American Stories.) She joined the Socialist party, and three months before May Day had picketed Boston’s State House when Woodrow Wilson spoke there. The President was opposed to women’s suffrage, so Martha and twenty-one members of the Women’s Party carried signs bearing such slogans as EQUAL RIGHTS and TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS TYRANNY. They were arrested and spent a well-publicized night in jail. Martha had her first taste of front-line action, and she liked it. By May Day she was ready for more. Martha’s cell was near William’s, and they managed to shout to each other over the din of the rapidly filling prison. The guards caught on quickly to William’s shyness and awkward courting, and began to tease him, saying that unless he behaved and stopped talking, they’d put Martha Foley in the same cell with him. Under the stress and strain, William’s sense of humor failed him, and he took the “threat” seriously, shouting back angrily to the guards that they wouldn’t dare insult him in that way—which, of course, they didn’t. As the evening wore on, Martha was joined by a dozen more women, most of whom did not really speak English. Nonetheless she managed to keep them in high spirits, leading them in a militant suffragist singalong. The Roxbury court convened the next day to consider 102 of the cases. After being identified by his arresting officer, William pleaded Not Guilty. While the average bail set for the prisoners was $500 to $1,000, William’s alone was $5,000. His counsel protested, but Judge Albert F. Hayden refused to lower it—Sidis, he believed, was largely responsible for the riot. Martha too protested her bail—it was high, at $1,000 in cash or $2,000 in property. She eventually obtained a bail bond and was released. Somehow, friends of the Sidises’ had discovered William’s plight and arranged for his bail. One of his Harvard classmates, Leverett Saltonstall, secured his release the following day. William’s trial was set for May 13. William’s dramatic arrest produced a flurry of headlines: “Young Harvard Prodigy Among 114 Prisoners,” “Boy Prodigy Among Red Flag Carriers,” “Sidis, Harvard ‘Boy Wonder’ in Dock—Said to Have Borne Red Flag; Miss Foley, a Suffragette, Also Held.” The Houston Post even remembered their city’s erstwhile teacher: “Will Sidis Again in the Limelight—Former Rice Instructor Who Defamed Houston Girls, Is Now Red Flagger.” On May 13, Judge Hayden presided over the cases of sixteen of the Boston May Day rioters. William’s testimony proved to be the most sensational, and it made headlines throughout the country. Judge Hayden regarded the demonstrators with extreme distaste. For days he had been handing out jail sentences to immigrants with names such as Frank Szyolofky and Deomid Potimsky, and like most Americans probably believed the Red Menace would poison his country irreparably. Martha Foley had already been sentenced to an eighteen-month term, which she somehow managed not to serve. William was identified by several policemen as the man who had carried the red flag at the head of the parade. A patrolman also testified that during the demonstration, when he asked Sidis why he was not carrying an American flag instead of a red flag, the boy wonder replied, “To hell with the American flag!” The Boston cases, especially that of the former Harvard prodigy, excited enormous local interest, and the courtroom was packed with spectators. William took the stand late in the afternoon. His first questioner was the counsel for the defense, Thomas G. Connolly. William, by all accounts, was sharp and quick—in the various battles of wits that followed, he proved himself a tough adversary. One reporter observed that while he was “nervous at times, he seemed to be little concerned with the serious charges on which he was in court.” After dispensing with a few preliminaries, Connolly began in earnest: “Were you carrying a red flag?” “I was carrying a red flag, two by three feet; it was a piece of red silk tacked to a piece of string.” “Are you a Socialist?” “Yes.” “Do you believe in the Soviet form of government?” “I do.” “Will you state briefly what the Soviet form of government is?” “That will be a rather difficult thing to do.” “Could you give his Honor a description in one hundred words?” William did it in sixty-one: “The Soviet form of government is the present revolutionary form of government in Russia. The word Soviet is the Russian word for counsel. The general principle is that those who do socially useful work are to control the government and industries of the country as officials of government do in general. The fundamental principle is that everybody is supposed to work.” “Would you say in that respect only those who do socially useful work?” “I would state that only those who do work shall be entitled to control the government, but those who are in nonessential industries would not be counted.” “Do you understand that they intend to get control through industries in which they work?” “So I understand.” “By force if necessary?” “I understand every government implies a certain power to suppress opposition.” “That does not answer the question. You said before that the people want control of the industries of the country. I want to know whether you advocate ‘by force’ the control of the industries of the country, or by use of the ballot.” “I countenance the use of force only in case it should be necessary, and I base my statement on a comparison of the Declaration of Independence of the United States government, which states clearly that the people shall be governed only with the consent of the governed.” William had thrown the proceedings for a loop—no previous defendant and Russian sympathizer had quoted the Declaration of Independence during his trial. Connolly pressed on: “Who decides? The majority or minority?” “The majority.” “Do you believe in economic evolution?” “I do.” “Do you believe in a God?” “No.” At this shocking admission, Connolly turned to the judge and in his client’s interest, asked that the court establish what was actually meant by the word “God.” Hayden replied, “God Almighty,” casting little illumination on the matter. William attempted to explain his position further: He said that the kind of a God he did not believe in was the “big boss of the Christians,” but he did believe in something “that is in a way apart from a human being.” To the further horror of Judge Hayden, William explained that he believed in the evolution of species as well as economic evolution. Connolly continued his interrogation. Did William believe that Soviet ideals necessarily implied violence? No, replied William, there should not be any violence on the road to that goal. The Bolsheviks, he explained, believed in the control of industry, and the Socialists believed in the ballot. Now Connolly brought out a piece of evidence that would become a regular part of trials such as these in the coming years: a red flag, the one the defendant had carried. William declared that the red stood for the common blood of humanity, as it does in the American flag. What, pressed Connolly, does the red in the American flag represent? “It stands for the common brotherhood of mankind,” repeated William, adding, “I do not believe we should have idolatry in the world. I do not idolize the red flag—it is just a piece of red silk.” Connolly held up the flag and asked William if he cared whether it was trampled and spat on. William repeated, “It is only a piece of red silk.” Next, William was cross-examined without event by the prosecution, whose questions were not nearly so probing as Connolly’s had been. Connolly returned for redirect examination. “For a man who believes in the Soviet form of government,” he said, “you certainly did not use much force.” “I do not believe in using force,” replied William simply. “And I did not say ‘To hell with the American flag’—I never use such language.” (This was true—William never swore, but when he wanted to, he always invoked the name of a lake in New Hampshire: Lake Chaugoggagoggamauchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug.) “Do you,” demanded Judge Hayden, “believe in what the American flag stands for?” William stood firm. “I believe in certain ways for what it stands, in the sense of the Declaration of Independence.” “Did you and Martha H. Foley, the militant suffragist, organize the parade, or have charge of it?” “I was not a leader of the parade—there were no leaders and as far as I know no permit was asked for.” “Didn’t you think there would be trouble when you went on the street with a red flag?” persisted the judge. “It did not occur to me.… Under the American flag I do not stand for the lynching of Negroes without trial.” Judge Hayden erupted, “We all know what the American flag stands for.” “Well I don’t,” interjected the feisty Connolly. “We have slavery here, fighting of armed thugs and everything else.” On this tense and confused note, the trial ended. The May Day offenders received their sentences, an average of six months in the house of correction. Only William and two others received eighteen months each—six months for rioting and a year for assaulting an officer, to be served at hard labor. William appealed, and was released on five hundred dollars bail. His paradise of seclusion had been shattered by his bold public protest, and he left the courtroom a notorious man, front-page fodder once again. 11 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility Boris Sidis was in a truly difficult position. Unlike his wife, who was an old-fashioned Republican, Boris had certain sympathies with radicalism. As a young man Boris had written fiery verse, which William translated from Russian at his
2mother’s request. At first Boris was enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution, but after a few months had passed he dourly told Sarah, “Their slavery is going to be deeper than it ever was under the Tsar.” In 1919, the year of his son’s arrest, Boris published a small book devoted to his own political views. In The Source and Aim of Human Progress: A Study in Social Psychology and Social Pathology, he described war as a “mental epidemic,” a mass hysteria that fed man’s most primitive impulses, his “fear instincts.” The result of fear run rampant was mass hypnosis, which produced a population of robotic humans. Boris condemned the Germans and the Allies with equal ferocity. He contemptuously wrote of “the great ‘saving’ mania,” and its hypnotic effect: “Everything and everybody had to be saved…. Save Belgium, save the country, save Democracy, save your food, from potato peelings to the garbage can. The suggestion was irresistible, and the weak human spirit yielded and fell into a deep social trance… Everybody was full of war…. Why wonder that when the air was full of the germs that the war malady spread like wild fire?” This pestilence, Boris declared, could only be compared with the crusade mania: “In this world-war nations fell to the lowest level of savagery. The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies… “No man,” continued Boris, “is so low as to deserve oppression, no opinion so mean as to merit suppression.” Every important step in human life could be traced to an individual or group of men “whose opinions were regarded as anti-social and dangerous, on account of their extreme radicalism.” But Boris now owned a mansion, ran a private practice. He had reaped the very sweetest fruits of capitalism, from seeds sown by his own fine mind, his hard work, his great ability. Boris was proud to be an American. He would fight, with the written word, those Americans who affronted the democracy he held dear, who perpetrated Red scares and the deportation of aliens. But though he supported his son’s rebellious spirit, he could not support his sympathy with communism. William had been emotionally and intellectually alienated from his mother for many years. Now, for the first time, he and his father stood divided. Boris and Sarah, too, were divided in their reactions to the scandal of their son’s behavior. Sarah described their attitudes in the years preceding William’s arrest: “While this phase of his youth ran its course, Billy was loud in his denunciation of everything done by any human who was older than twenty-five, especially his parents. We were ‘bourgeois,’ he said, like he was the first boy who ever thought of using the term to describe his parents. “Boris was entirely undisturbed. ‘It seems quite normal to me,’ he said. ‘Youth that has no rebellion in it is not worth its salt. Remember when you rebelled and studied though your mother wanted you to marry the jeweler’s son? Don’t worry, this is good for him.’ “But it hurt me, to some extent. While my son was probably right in describing me as ‘bourgeois’—I have enjoyed fame and money —it seemed to me very shallow of him to be so loud in his condemnation of his father, in whose image Billy was so molded.” For Sarah, the shame of the family disgrace, the tarnishing of the Sidises’ image, the editorials in The New York Times, were an agony. To sully the image of “Dr. Science,” and of the immigrant family risen from the slums—this was an unforgivable outrage. For Boris, the argument was philosophical, ideological—rebellion was natural to youth, but communism was a wrong, an evil, philosophy. When he headed the May Day parade, William had gone to extremes Boris could no longer condone. Elliot Sagall remembered Boris’s reaction: “William became a radical. He and Boris had different philosophies. And Boris Sidis being a professor at Harvard … this was insufferable, to have his son in an anarchistic parade on Main Street! He was put in jail, and we heard his father used his influence to get him out. And he tried to cover it up.” William Fadiman recalled, “We were liberals, and so we understood. But we all felt that Billy had been set up because his last name was Sidis, and in Boston that was a very big name—Sidis of Harvard, etc. He had been set up to be leader of the May Day parade, so that the radicals would have publicity for their party. We thought he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He was victimized to some degree.” Clifton Fadiman shared his brother’s impression of Billy’s credulity: “His communism, I think, was very naive in character. I never got the impression that it was anything but a wild outburst of general indignation.” The events that followed William’s trial are among the most confusing portions of Sidis history. Somehow Boris pulled the appropriate strings and kept his son out of jail, but William was not exactly a free man. As Helena described it, “He was cleared, sort of temporarily, but it took a number of years before they were able to clear him so he could even be in Massachusetts.” According to a number of accounts, the case was eventually nol-prossed in the Superior Court, at the request of the prosecution; if this is true, it was probably the result of Boris’s further efforts. It is also possible that Boris and Sarah did not inform their son when they achieved the nolle prosequi, as a way of maintaining control over him. This is likely, since William remained frightened of possible arrest for a good many years. The ordeal that followed was a prison term nonetheless, in William’s opinion. His parents swooped down on Boston, scooped him up, and took him to Portsmouth, where they set about to reform their boy wonder. Little is known of what happened in the year that followed. Sarah’s memoirs, despite their meticulous detailing of her son’s every childhood action, shrivel up and end here. The last completed chapter, “Billy Rebels,” is nothing more than a smattering of cheerful anecdotes, without mention of the harsh conflicts that rent the family. William rarely spoke to his friends about this period of his life. Yet twenty-five years later he was still bitter—he submitted the following to a radical journal he co-edited: “RAILROADING” IN THE PAST Lest anyone acquire the impression that sending conscientious objectors to asylums is a new trick, it might be of interest to note that the trick was known in the last war. A CO [conscientious objector] who was too young to be called on to register till late in 1918, and who thereby escaped any actual draft call up to the time of the Armistice, was hauled into court on a trumped-up charge in May, 1919. The sentence was appealed (such procedure is normal in Massachusetts district courts); but, before the appeal could come to trial, he was kidnapped by his parents, by arrangement with the district attorney, and was taken to a sanatorium operated by them. He was kept there a full year—from October, 1919, to October, 1920—and kept under various kinds of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at (everything that did or did not happen was grounds for a tongue-lashing protracted over many hours) for an average of six to eight hours a day; sometimes this scolding was administered while he was loaded with sleeping medicine, or after being waked up out of a sound sleep. And the threat of being transferred to a regular insane asylum was held up in front of him constantly, with detailed descriptions of the tortures practiced there, as well as of the simple legal process by which he could be committed to such a place. He was unlawfully held in this sanatorium, but he could not escape while watch was being kept, for the criminal case was kept pending against him, and it was on the court records that he had jumped bail (being kidnapped, he could not appear for trial, or even know that trial had been called). In October, 1920, he was taken to California, to prevent his communicating somehow with friends in his home city sixty miles away. He made his escape from there in September, 1921, by which time he appeared to be scared of his own shadow. The attempt to get him back to the old tortures was never given up, the parents resorting, from time to time, to various efforts to track him down and to persuade his friends to turn him over for “protection,” especially when any misfortune is known to come his way. A particular effort to bring him under control of relatives was made about a year ago, but was highly unsuccessful. Since, in most states, any two physicians can commit a man, without giving him a chance to defend himself, into a sanatorium Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility that as merely symbols of her dislike of him and he wouldn’t have any of that. So I think what they quarreled about was life-style.” This bizarre little document is virtually the only account of this traumatic segment of William’s life, and it leads one to ask many questions. Did his parents really dope him? Did they actually threaten to commit him to an insane asylum? How could William truly have been kidnapped and held prisoner? One of William’s closest friends throughout his adult life, fellow radical Julius Eichel, addressed the question of the “imprisonment”: “His father and mother had some power over him. As far as he knew they could turn him over to the police any time they wished—an old indictment was hanging over him. For many years he dared not go openly to Boston, for he feared arrest for that May Day activity.” In Helena’s opinion: “Billy couldn’t take any correction. I could; it didn’t bother me. Billy said to me, ‘You are like a reed, and you bend and then come upright again. I am like an oak tree, and I get uprooted.’ And of course, I have learned to be a little diplomatic, tell little white lies. He was straightforward, and utterly frank, and would tell everybody just what he thought of them—and that’s not the best way. He always told me I had a New England conscience and it would get me into trouble. But why would he say that, when he was far more conscientious than I was and far more honest? I have learned to lie, I don’t think he ever learned to. My mother could lie. I don’t think my father could very well. According to Helena, all the family fighting was over petty issues. Sarah harped and hammered away at her son with a daily refrain of “Do it this way.” Recalled Clifton Fadiman, “I think Sarah, like most mothers, wanted him to live like a mensch, you know, put on a tie and eat right—chicken soup and so forth. But he thought of all that as merely symbols of her dislike of him and he wouldn’t have any of that. So I think what they quarreled about was life-style.” A major source of friction was William’s appearance. At twenty-one he had bulked out considerably, and despite his handsome face, he was ungainly and sloppy. He had developed psoriasis and his sensitive skin made it difficult for him to shave. At a time when men wore suits and high collars, William was content with sneakers (without socks) and an unfashionable cap. Both Boris and Sarah criticized their son’s garb, which was odd, since neither of them was much concerned personally about dress. Helena, who was ten, adopted her parents’ point of view about the May Day parade, and thought her brother had been foolish to get involved in it. But brother and sister remained close, and little Helena suffered acutely from the constant tension and bickering in the family. She was particularly upset by a mother-son spat that occurred just a few months after William’s trial and “abduction.” As she described it, “My mother got really red in the face. He had insulted her. She just sat down and said, ‘I am insulted.’ Then she went and sat somewhere else and said, ‘I am insulted.’ Then she went and sat somewhere else and said, ‘I am insulted.’ I was ten years old, and it was a big word. I didn’t know what ‘insulted’ meant. I wondered what in the world my brother had said, but she wasn’t the kind of person that you could ask. I never found out what it was about. Now my father would never have behaved like that. He might have yelled at Billy—he did—but she pushed him into it. I don’t think my mother consciously encouraged my father to turn against Billy. But people ask, ‘Did she have enough power over my father to turn him against Billy? She had plenty of power over anybody to turn them against anyone! “Another time, in California, my brother and father and mother were fighting, I don’t remember what about. Billy was sitting in a chair, suffering a very bad cold, or an allergy. A neighbor’s dog, Patsy, used to visit us often; and that day Patsy ran over to him, and laid a paw on his knee, and looked up in his face. Years later he told me, “That was the only sympathy I got there.” Not surprisingly, William parted ways with the Socialists and joined the Communist party. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the Communists. He observed that the Russian people had traded slavery under the Tsar for slavery under Lenin, and he was disgusted to see that the American Communist party was wracked by infighting, and its members were more loyal to the central power in Russia than they were to the United States. Horrified by Communist repression of individual liberties, he quit the party, and began to talk to radical friends about his vision of an American party: a party with no international ties, and with democratic, cooperative ownership of industries by workers, free from all governmental interference. Helena concluded, “As a Red, he was pretty much a pink.” William, like so many radicals, longed to go to Russia and see communism in action. He almost had his chance. President Wilson appointed Boris to an American “peace delegation” to Russia, and William was to go along as interpreter. Shortly before the departure date, Boris went to Washington to discuss the trip with Wilson, withdrawing angrily when he discovered that the President did not plan to bring home American troops still fighting with the Poles against the Russian revolutionaries. Though the trip fell through, the plans are revealing—if Boris and William planned to travel together, the bad blood between father and son could not have been beyond repair. A reporter for the New York Sunday News, writing many years later, referred to this period of William’s life with an astute observation: “He developed radical tendencies so extreme that even members of the Communist party lifted their eyebrows a bit. This political leaning was in itself strange. For the Communist, theoretically at least, works for his fellows while from all one can gather, Sidis worked for none but himself.” Sarah wrote, “Billy’s communism did not last many months. His rebellion was part of the quick blood of youth. A few years after the Russian Revolution I asked him whether he thought communism was working. He replied, ‘How should I know? Communism has never been tried.’ ” In writing off her son’s behavior as “the quick blood of youth,” Sarah failed completely to see that William remained passionately devoted to radicalism; her blind spot could only have increased the tension between them. Other difficulties troubled the family. Helena underwent a series of ailments, and Boris remained very sick. He had never fully recovered from his bout with the Spanish flu, and in his weakened condition he suffered a mild stroke. Helena recalled, “Father was ill for a long time. He kept it to himself. I don’t think my mother was terribly conscious of his illness. She was not terribly conscious of the fact that I was i11. After a difficult year in Portsmouth, Boris was encouraged by his doctors to return to California. What William referred to as his “kidnapping,” Sarah saw in an entirely different light, writing, “In his early twenties, after his flurry of revolt, Billy came out to California with us. Because the Institute was closed, and because Boris and Sarah rented a relatively expensive home in San Diego, there were money problems on top of everything else. That winter Boris had his second, more serious, stroke. Remarkably, he continued to work, producing books and papers at almost his former pace. William had two major forms of escape from the family tension. When he was not suffering “tongue-lashings,” he took refuge in writing and in travel. He often borrowed the family car or boarded the bus, and toured the small towns that dotted the California coast. Sarah reminisced about his travels: “Helena always turned to nature, but it was the man-made world that Billy loved. He told me with a glow of the pleasure that he got in going into strange towns, and eating at little holes-in-the-wall with all the people who drive the trucks and push the typewriters that make the world go. Thus Billy, who had grown up among people who were above all intellectual, who made their mark on their time, fell in love with the type of person who leaves no record in this world, except in the memory of those who loved them. He once told me, ‘Mother, a man who has lost his anonymity has lost a precious and irreplaceable thing.’ Billy never left America. He joked about his provinciality, but was stubborn in it, and later when Helena and I traveled in Europe he flatly refused to go with us. “Billy read a great deal about any town he planned to visit, its history and geography. Then he would go and explore it. ‘I can really see a town,’ he told me, ‘because I am not in it, don’t belong to it. And I have learned how to look so that I can see the town of fifty years ago, or one hundred years ago. I can see the Indian mounds and trails that were there first.’ “Not only did he love the history of these little towns, he loved the ‘now’ in them, he said. He gave far more time when he was grown to the language of the American people than he had ever given when he astonished professors as a child by learning Latin, Greek, Russian, and German. He wrote a dictionary of what he called the ‘lingo’ of this land. He prided himself on his ear for dialect, for accent.” The “lingo dictionary” is long lost, but it was not to be the last time he would demonstrate a fascination with language not only “American” but essentially “uneducated.” In 1925, Richard G. Badger, owner of Boston’s Gorham Press and publisher of most of Boris Sidis’s books, brought out The Animate and the Inanimate by William James Sidis. Considerable mystery surrounds the book’s publication. The preface was completed in 1920, when William was twenty-two. Why had William waited five years to publish it? Some, but not all, of Badger’s books were vanity publications—was this one of them? Why didn’t it receive a single review? Since the name William James Sidis was always good for a newspaper story, why was this major work completely ignored? How did it entirely escape the attention of Boston’s reporters? Perhaps the press wasn’t up to comprehending the work, and its level of brilliance was certainly no help to any reporter looking for a “genius gone crazy” story. And how did the academic community miss it? In 1979, fifty-four years after its publication, a Columbia University graduate student, Dan Mahony, brought the book to the attention of Sidis’s former classmate Buckminster Fuller. Fuller wrote the following letter to Gerard Piel of Scientific American, urging Piel to reprint the text: “Imagine my excitement and joy on being handed this Xerox of Sidis’s 1925 book, in which he clearly predicts the black hole. In fact, I find his whole book to be a fine cosmological piece…. Norbert Wiener used to talk to me about him… and Norbert was grieved that Sidis did not go on to fulfill his seemingly great promise of brilliance…. I hope you will become as excited as I am at this discovery that Sidis did go on after college to do the most magnificent thinking and writing. I find him focusing in on many of the same subjects that fascinate me, and coming to about the same conclusions as those I have published in Synergetics, and will be publishing in Synergetics Volume II.” Fuller’s praise for The Animate and the Inanimate is not overblown. Indeed, the book explores the theory of black holes—collapsed stars so heavy and dense that their high gravity prevents even light from escaping—fourteen years before the publication of another work commonly recognized as the first on the subject. The second book suggesting the existence of these mysterious stellar objects was An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Stucture, written by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1939. Sidis actually wrote his book five years before it was published in 1920; and he had formulated his ideas as early as 1915 during his stay at Rice Institute. Since William did not fraternize with scientists, he accomplished all this without knowing the latest theories making the informal rounds of scientific circles. He reached his conclusions using the same methods that his father taught his mother when she wanted to learn geometry as a young, uneducated immigrant—read the basic laws, and figure out the rest for yourself. As the basis for The Animate and the Inanimate, William explored the possibility that all the laws of the universe are reversible in time, with the apparent exception of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is analogous to running a film backward—theoretically, all laws of physics would still hold true in a reverse-running universe, except the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law is popularly known as the Law of Entropy; that is, the universe is proceeding on an unstoppable course toward total chaos and “heat death.” All the particles of all the atoms in the universe will eventually bounce off each other, moving farther and farther away from each other, until they no longer collide at all; then nothing will move, nothing will live, and the universe will exist in a frozen tableau forever afterward. If one imagines this happening in reverse, there is no energy source to cause any particles to bind together in the ordered forms that make up matter —therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is believed to be irreversible. William offers the following image as a relatively simple introduction to his theory: If one were to watch a film running backward, for example a ball bouncing down stairs, it would appear that the ball were being “pushed” by each stair, up to the next one. Where would this “push” come from? Everything else about the picture would look normal—gravity, mass, and so forth. But there is no physical law yet to explain a normal stair “pushing” on a ball, so that a ball would inexplicably come to rest at the top of the stairs. William suggested that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a law at all, but a probability. The fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems always to hold true is more or less coincidence in our corner of the universe. Also, entropy is reversed in other corners of the universe—elsewhere, chaos is proceeding to order. And if the Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to dominate local events, then probability suggests that there must be reversals of it all around us that we haven’t yet recognized. In the book’s preface, William credits his godfather, William James, and not his own father, with the discovery of “reserve energy.” Following the observations that led James to suggest a “reserve energy,” Sidis theorized that inanimate (dead) objects follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics, while animate (living) things reverse the law, and draw on a “reserve fund” of energy to mold the universe to their will. Life provided the reversal of entropy that Sidis’s theory required. William’s theory remains highly speculative; there is no reason to believe that a reverse universe exists. Also, biological processes are no longer the mystery they were at the time of his writing. But while working on this problem, Sidis came up with other conclusions that are interesting to this day. Cosmogony is the study of the origins of the universe; the most popularly known theory today is called the “Big Bang” theory. In The Animate and the Inanimate, William proposed a “Great Collision” theory, wherein two large, inert bodies, containing all the matter in the universe between them, collided; this collision provided the energy that started the universe in motion. As our sun hurtles through space to an eventual frozen death, it gives off energy. Somewhere in the universe there are suns that take in energy, and death becomes life. This other kind of sun Sidis dubbed a “black body,” since it would be taking in all light energy, and therefore be totally invisible. This exactly describes a black hole. Should the Second Law of Thermodynamics eventually reverse itself in this “black body,” it would then start giving off energy and become a sun. In this way, the universe would be in a perpetual state of ebb and flow, all energy being conserved. Scientists all over the world are still working on a problem known as “Fermi’s paradox,” proposed by Enrico Fermi. If the universe is infinite, Fermi postulated, then everything possible must occur somewhere sometime; therefore, there must exist a planet where the inhabitants speak English. Why haven’t we met them? Why haven’t we met anyone out there? Young Sidis also said, “The theory of the reversibility of the universe supposes that life exists under all sorts of circumstances, even on such hot bodies as the sun.” Like Fermi’s paradox, Sidis’s reversibility theory also requires that life must exist in every corner of the universe, in order to provide the necessary reversals of the law of entropy. The theory is challenging, fascinating, and controversial on its own merits today. It was far more so in 1925; and it must be remembered that it sprang from the mind of a boy in his early twenties, who devoted only a portion of his scholarship to this book, because he was dedicated to such a vast variety of other intellectual pursuits at the same time. Had he dedicated his life entirely to cosmogony, who knows what extraordinary body of work he might have produced? Sidis himself called his work purely speculative in nature, since there was a dearth of observations available to prove or disprove his reversibility theory. How much faster might cosmology, cosmogony, and particle physics have progressed had his ideas been examined by the scientific community? Sidis even went so far as to include a chapter on his own objections to his theory: “All that is attempted here is, not to prove this theory scientifically, or even to claim it as perfectly consistent with itself or with facts, but merely to indicate that there are … other possible theories than the one at present generally accepted by physicists, and yet not more absurd or more inconsistent with facts.” And in his preface, Sidis states: “At first I hesitated to publish my theory of the reversibility of the universe, but … I have decided to publish the work and give my theory to the world, to be accepted or rejected, as the case may be.” As it turned out, Sidis’s theory wasn’t even considered. William never spoke of his thoughts or feelings about being ignored. However, he ceased to write about mathematics, physics, or cosmogony. He never again published a book under his own name. That he drew nationwide attention when he talked about girls in Texas, and none at all when he broke ground theorizing about the structure and laws of the universe, must have seemed to the boy prodigy a sick sort of joke. When William was twenty-three, he and his parents had their final fight. According to his sister it was over an office job he lost for some trivial reason: “He didn’t do something he should have done—maybe it was his clothes or his manners.” Whatever it was, it was the last straw for William, and, as he put it, “He made his escape … scared of his own shadow.” Fearing arrest if he returned to Boston, he headed for New York. That city held a number of attractions for him, not the least of which was its new resident Martha Foley. William found his first refuge at the home of his aunt Bessie Fadiman. She gave him a small room, with the understanding that he could stay for a few weeks. Bessie was warm and welcoming toward William, although he was something of a nuisance. For one thing, his eating habits were bizarre. She was disconcerted to see him attack a plate of food one article at a time—first the meat, then the potatoes, then the peas, etc. This unusual approach dismayed nearly every host who served William dinner. Also, he followed his aunt around the house, complaining constantly about his parents. One of his bitterest refrains, she remembered, stemmed from his early childhood. William lamented that his parents had not taught him the rudiments of grooming, and to his great embarrassment he had found himself years behind other children in the simplest matters, such as tying his shoelaces or getting dressed properly. At the age of twenty-three, these humiliations still rankled (but not enough, evidently, for him to change his now casual approach to these matters). Eventually William rented his own, cheap apartment, and settled into life in New York. He took a job as an interpreter with an agency handling Soviet business in America. He expanded his political contacts, and could often be found at the offices of the League for Industrial Democracy or at the American Civil Liberties Union. He formed what was to become a lifelong friendship with fellow conscientious objector Julius Eichel, a Brooklyn pharmacist who at the time of William’s arrest was already serving a prison term for his pacifism. Eichel too listened to William’s complaints about his parents, who by now had returned to Portsmouth. The light of William’s life was Martha Foley, whom he saw often. He confided the details of their meetings to Eichel, who wrote about the trysting twenty years later. “Sidis sought out his new flame and carried on a romance on Central Park benches. He was very naive when he would tell this story of his lovemaking. The first time he had her to himself in Central Park he kissed her with a great deal of ardor. ‘Why, you kiss like an experienced lover,’ she said. ‘Where did you get that experience?’ And he naively answered, as he later told us, ‘Why, can’t you believe it comes as naturally to me as any other man?’ An elated William secured a photograph of Martha, which he flourished at every opportunity. Cousin Clifton Fadiman saw it, as did numerous other acquaintances. “He would suddenly take it out, her picture. We might be talking about the price of eggs and all of a sudden he would say, ‘Did I ever show you this?’ And it was Martha.” William continued to drop in on the Fadimans, usually for a meal. His visits made the teenaged Clifton uncomfortable. “He would come to our house without any announcement—it never occurred to him to use the phone. Because we were his aunt and uncle and cousins we couldn’t throw him out. ‘Home,’ as Mr. Frost’s line has it, ‘is where they have to take you in.’ But he was a damn nuisance. His conversation was never submitted to the ordinary conventional rules. It was explosive. His voice would get very loud when he complained of his mother and father. He certainly never asked for any pity, but he often screwed himself into a state of excitement. In many ways his eccentricities were the consequence of his not having the conventional censor that we all have. “I don’t think he had anything like a regular job. He lived in third-rate little lodgings. He ate at the Automat. He was simply not an attractive man. He was quite large, about six feet tall, overweight, slovenly, with a mild skin disease. He was never ragged, but he didn’t seem to change his clothes. Even we, who weren’t dressed very well, felt somehow that this was somebody from the street—that’s what my mother used to say. And she’d try to clean him up and give him food. He was an enormous eater. When he came to our house, it was straight antique Jewish hospitality. And he would eat anything put before him no matter how frequently it was repeated.” William Fadiman, too, commented on his cousin’s clothing: “He dressed not oddly, but shabbily. His clothes were ill fitting and unpressed. Shoes were always scuffed and dirty. And he didn’t bathe very often. He always wore a vest, summer or winter, which is curious. He wore a tie. He was quite formal, in a bizarre way.” But more puzzling to the Fadiman brothers than William’s appearance was his attitude toward academic or intellectual matters. When Clifton ventured to discuss mathematics with his illustrious cousin, William turned on him furiously, saying, “I don’t ever want to talk about that kind of thing!” According to Clifton, he referred contemptuously to “the intellect and the world of ideas, particularly mathematics. He didn’t say it was nonsense, but he would not talk about it. We would ask him what he was doing and he would toss it off. My impression is that he didn’t know what the hell was going on in the intellectual world; that he abjured everything that his father respected, everything about the academic, intellectual life. We thought he was merely passing his time in some second-rate lodging house doing nothing. And he read pulp science-fiction novels. I read them too—they were great. But you wouldn’t think this great intellectual would like that sort of thing.” William was a little more forthcoming with William Fadiman. He spoke to him at length and with great enthusiasm about a novel he had been writing for several years, concerning the lost continent of Atlantis. Nevertheless, his basic stance was consistent. According to William Fadiman, “He abhorred being referred to as ‘the genius.’ If someone found out about him in the beginning of a relationship, he would get very choleric. He would get rid of and be furious at that person. He never swore, but he indicated as clearly as a man could that he was angry, that this was nobody’s business but his own.” This, then, was the young man who had recently completed a major work in theoretical physics. In a few years he would publish it, a work so undeniably brilliant, so profoundly intellectual, and so heavily based in pure mathematics that his cousins, had they known about it, would have been very bewildered indeed. Said Clifton, “I never knew he had any interests.” Though William would publish The Animate and the Inanimate under his own name, it would be the last time he did, using pseudonyms forever after. He had begun his double life. 12 In Search of Solitude During the two years that William spent with his parents, he had escaped the prying eye of the press. In 1922, when he was twenty-four, the Boston Traveler dug up enough material for a front-page story: “What Has Become of Sidis, the Boy Prodigy?” The article undoubtedly aggravated William, for not only was it riddled with inaccuracies about his childhood, but it accused him of cowardice: “Sentenced to jail, Sidis has neither served time nor appeared in the superior court to fight the matter out.” The Traveler sought information about William’s whereabouts from an unnamed “former friend,” who supplied the curious information that Sidis was now a teacher in “a New York labor-Socialist school…. Previous to the May Day ‘Roxbury riots’ he had been teaching in ‘Hesperia,’ the socialistic school for children set up in the south end by Frank Mack and raided by the authorities in 1919.” Since the article is full of erroneous information, some of this may be false. However, there was a Boston Communist named Frank Mack who was deported to his native Britain in 1922 after association with a radical school, and it may well be that William had again assumed the role of teacher despite his traumatic experience at the Rice Institute. The former friend, evidently knowing nothing of William’s love for Martha Foley, insisted that William was a woman-hater. He was equally certain that William did not know how to enjoy himself: “He has no conception of play or pleasure—outside his intellectual pursuits. Likewise he has no conception of beauty. I once showed him a remarkable picture of a mountain. ‘Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s only a big hill.’ ” Aside from this article, William received no publicity, and did not participate in any more political demonstrations that might land him on the front pages. His life was gradually becoming a happy one. He no longer had his parents or journalists to torment him, he had an active social life and, as always, an extraordinary intellectual life. His courtship of Martha had not progressed beyond the kissing stage. Although they remained close friends, she let it be known that she was not interested in anything more. Apparently, this disturbed William not at all, and he spoke about her to friends with the same enthusiasm as before. Perhaps he held out hopes for the future, or perhaps he was secretly relieved at the limits she set. William eventually lost his job as an interpreter, and set out to look for work. Thus began a series of menial office employments that earned him enough to survive and little more—between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week—but enabled him to preserve his precious anonymity. His real work, the writing of the books he loved, was done on his own time and without moneymaking in mind. This comfortable existence was shaken on October 24, 1923, when William received a phone call from a friend telling him that his father had died that morning at Portsmouth, of a cerebral hemorrhage. No one knows how William took the news, but he did not attend the funeral. His reason for not appearing, however, seems not to have been disdain for his father, but a refusal to see his mother. Since his departure from California, he and Helena had corresponded steadily, often in French. In his letters he explained that he wanted to visit her, but he couldn’t abide their mother. Great as the tension had been between father and son, it was not enough to keep him away. The possibility of a painful run-in with Sarah was. Boris Sidis’s death came as a shock to his colleagues and to the public. He was only fifty-six, and even some of his best friends never knew how ill he was. He had published seventeen books and more than fifty magazine articles in twenty-five years, and at the time of his death was hard at work on another book, The Psychology of the Folk Tale. Boris had requested simple and informal services, which were attended by family, friends, colleagues, and admirers from around the country. The funeral was held at Maplewood Farms, and Boris was buried on the estate. Obituaries ran in newspapers across the country, some describing him as the first American doctor to practice psychotherapy. In spite of Boris’s distinction, his death was not the front-page news that his son’s arrest had been. Boris’s estate was surprisingly small, considering his wide reputation and the wealth of his clientele. The expenses of the last few years —the trips to California, maintaining the Institute, and his illness—had told on the family bank account. He left his children about four thousand dollars each. Helena was to receive her inheritance at twenty-one, while William could collect his immediately. Though it meant braving Sarah, William went to Portsmouth to claim the inheritance. Relatives and family friends looked upon his decision with contempt. Because he hadn’t attended the funeral, some felt he had no right to take the money. Others thought he should turn his portion over to his mother, since she was a widow with an enormous estate to run and he was a brilliant young man who could easily make a fortune. No one knows what passed between William and Sarah during this visit, but Clifton Fadiman described an unfortunate meeting between mother and son during this period: “Sarah visited us, and he came in, apparently accidentally. And there was a real fight between them, in our home.” Fadiman did not remember the cause of the argument—some trivial matter—but he did recall his aunt’s aggression: “My aunt was a very arrogant, self-confident person. I think she had a deep sense of guilt. And highly aggressive and arrogant people like Sarah are hard put to accommodate their sense of guilt. So it expresses itself in more indignation and more anger and more fury, rather than reconciliation.” After this harsh exchange, mother and son ceased altogether to communicate. Helena now assumed the unenviable position of go-between and buffer for the two, living with her mother and visiting her brother on neutral territory at the Fadimans’ home in New York. In the previous year, Helena’s situation had altered radically. She missed her brother, and though Boris had told her “your cousin Jack will be a brother to you,” it wasn’t the same. Shortly before her father’s death, when she was thirteen, Boris had summoned her and announced that he wanted her to take over the running of the Institute. Sarah, though she managed the place brilliantly, got along badly with the patients. Boris no longer nurtured hopes that William would fill his shoes, and so he looked to his daughter, who began by helping him with his patients and his voluminous correspondence with European psychiatrists. Despite her father’s seeming confidence in her, Helena was extremely doubtful that the patients would accept a thirteen-year-old girl in a position of authority, and she suspected that her father privately shared these doubts. He had been adamant about her other options for the future: he didn’t want her to go to college because, as she said, “He didn’t think much of women’s education,” or, as she speculated, “He was so fed up with my brother that he didn’t want to educate me.” Furthermore, there remained his general contempt for universities. Helena was a budding poet, and Boris was convinced that if she went to college, her professors would “destroy her literary talent.” Because of her series of illnesses, he didn’t think she’d ever be well enough to go out into the world and get a job, and so he wanted to groom and prepare her to manage the Institute. When Boris died, Helena realized what it was that she truly wanted: to go to college. She’d had no tutors and had never been to school, though with her father’s encouragement she was well grounded in Plato and Aristotle. Still, that was hardly enough to prepare her for a college entrance exam. Helena decided that she couldn’t afford a professional tutor or a private prep school, so she studied for the exams at home. She and William had long corresponded in French, and now one of the patients tutored her further. Her cousin Jack Goldwyn came to her aid, coaching her in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. Most important, Helena followed her mother’s advice, the same advice Boris had given Sarah some thirty years before: If you can reason things out, you don’t need to use your memory. William was supportive if somewhat doubtful. He was worried that his sister would strain her health cramming, trying to fit eight years of grammar school and four years of high school into a single year. But in spite of everything, Helena prevailed. She flunked her first entrance exams to Smith College because she had never taken a written test in her life. The second time, she ranked third out of a hundred or more students. In 1924, Helena entered Smith College, but the stress of her remarkable achievement caught up with her. She fell so violently ill with flu that she missed the entire first year, but returned in 1925 to major in sociology. After her father’s death, Helena’s relationship with her mother deteriorated. “My father died and I got the brunt,” she reflected. Boris or William had always been there to leap to her defense, and now she had no protection against her mother’s rages. “It is normal for a mother, when she loses a child as my mother did Billy, to transfer the attention to the remaining child. Well, she didn’t.” Helena hid from Sarah, retreating to an upstairs bedroom to study, “away from her yelling and giving orders.” Sarah was under an enormous strain, and it intensified the most abrasive aspects of her personality. She missed her husband terribly, she was completely estranged from her son, and she was shackled with a huge estate and its attendant financial burdens. Somehow, in her inimitable way, she managed. The staff was reduced to an absolute minimum, and when summer came, Sarah opened up Maplewood Farms as a tourist resort. After collecting his inheritance, William resumed his active social life and his prolific writing in New York. He put a little of his money aside for travel and the rest he invested in bus stocks. He made a brief trip to California by bus, presumably to visit Martha Foley, who was working as a newspaperwoman in San Francisco. (She remained in California for three years, not returning to the East Coast until 1925.) William’s customary cheerfulness was not dampened by her absence—he continued to brandish her picture and chatter about her to friends. Returning to New York, William got an office job, and he carefully guarded from his employers and coworkers the secret of his genius. His task was to run a comptometer, which was the first wholly key-operated calculating machine. It was a far more difficult device to use than present-day adding machines, and some of the operations called for two hands crossing over on one machine, working two or more keys in different columns at the same time. William was highly skilled at his job—he frequently astounded employers by operating two comptometers at the same time, one with his right hand and one with his left, using his elbow for the space bar. As much as William abhorred calling attention to himself, his passion for doing excellent work overruled even this consideration. On January 10, 1924, three months after his father’s death, the New York Herald Tribune exposed William’s identity in a front-page story: Boy Brain Prodigy of 1909 Now $23-a-Week Adding Machine; Son of Late Dr. Boris Sidis, Who, in Knee Pants, Lectured to Harvard Professors, Lives as a Clerk; Shuns Mother and Friends; Shrugs at Books, Theaters, and Girls and Prefers Job That Takes No Thinking. At 26, the boy prodigy of 1909 has become a mere cog in the workaday world of 1924. For $23 a week he is working as a clerk in the statistical division of an uptown office.… About six months ago persons in New York who were interested in young Sidis tried to find a job for him. They finally succeeded in placing him with the concern for which he is now working, but not without difficulty, for he insisted on being given work that did not require too much thinking. The reporter wrote of “the tragedy that young Sidis represents,” castigating him for not attending his father’s funeral and for cutting off contact with his mother. The most serious charges the reporter leveled against Sidis were of eccentricity, sloppiness, and indifference to common concerns: As one of the tide of humanity that ebbs and flows at nine and five each weekday in New York, young Sidis is distinguished only by being less careful of his appearance than the average New York clerk. Chided recently for a seeming lack of ambition, he said: “All I want is a little greater margin than I have, so I may put something aside for a rainy day.” “But don’t you care about books, the theater, girls, automobiles, all the things that are denied you on twenty-three dollars a week?” Sidis merely shrugged his shoulders. Yesterday young Sidis was wearing a cheap brown suit, much too tight for his fleshy frame. He had not been shaved; his reddish moustache was a ragged fringe that appeared to have been whacked off with a pair of manicure scissors. His mop of mouse-colored hair was in need of trimming. His necktie was in a hard knot, that did not come within inches of his collar. Not only did William affront by not being dressed properly, he offended by his lack of interest in “normal” pursuits: girls, the theater, automobiles. On the one hand, he was expected to be special—that is, to be brilliant, and above clerical work; on the other, he was expected to be “normal”—interested in ordinary amusements. The conflict between these two requirements seems to have escaped the Tribune reporter as it had so many before him. And, like so many of his brethren, he thought nothing of publicly humiliating William with a lip-smacking description of his badly trimmed moustache and his “mouse-colored hair.” The Tribune article prompted a snide editorial the following day in The New York Times. Entitled “Precocity Doesn’t Wear Well,” it began: “Parents whose boys show no indications of being or becoming intellectual giants can get consolation from observing what has happened in the case of the once much-advertised son of Dr. Boris Sidis, the Boston psychologist.” After thus reassuring the parents of dull children, the Times gave a brief summary of his activities in the intervening years, and concluded: “The mental fires that burned so brightly have died down, to all appearances. It may be, of course, that precocity now takes the shape of realizing that all is vanity, and ordinary successes are not worth seeking, but such philosophy is a poor result of the speed shown early in the race; and while young Sidis is no more to be criticized adversely than anybody else for not wanting what he doesn’t want, it is hard not to regret that his marvels should have been confined to adolescence.” If he had been a man of different temperament, perhaps he would have sent a copy of The Animate and the Inanimate to the Times, or written a letter of complaint. But he did not. He probably thought that his great work of theoretical physics was not fit for such little minds, and disdained to argue with them. He wanted only his solitude, and now, exposed as a genius, he quit his job. Indeed, the editorial writer of the Times had hit on a point of truth: For such a prodigy as William, “ordinary successes are not worth seeking.” Where the reporter went wrong was in guessing the reason for William’s indifference to these successes. It was not that the prodigy had realized, as the reporter thought, “that all is vanity.” It was rather that he had had enough of callous reporters and an insatiable public, who seemed to believe that he owed them a debt just because he was a genius—who felt he was obliged to perform marvels with the regularity of a trained seal, and that if he did not, he ought to be criticized, pilloried, and humiliated. But a mind is not public property. William Sidis had only one debt—the same debt every man has to himself—to achieve his own happiness and fulfillment, using his mind to the best of his ability. To achieve this happiness, William chose an extraordinary path: to lie about his genius, that he might remove it from the public arena; to pretend he was ordinary; to maintain his privacy; and to follow his star alone, publishing under pen names and teaching small groups of students who would not betray him. His choice was a brave one, but he never became cynical about it, and he never lost sight of the stars he followed. While he hated academia and spoke harshly of the world of academics, he became more and more pedantic; while he pretended to dislike the intellect, he read and wrote ever more prolifically. The strain showed on Sidis—it accounted for many of his eccentricities and increased his reputation as a burnout and a failure. A growing part of the Sidis myth was that he had indeed had a nervous breakdown. Different people placed it at different times in his life—some said it occurred during his childhood, others after the May Day affair. This rumor was so prevalent that even Norbert Wiener believed it, writing in his memoirs of “how great a loss mathematics suffered in his premature break-down,” and adding that “the collapse of Sidis was in large measure his father’s making.” After receiving his M.A. from Harvard, Norbert went in an entirely different direction from William’s, and it is worthwhile to compare the paths the two geniuses followed. Norbert himself had worrying about whether he was tactless and out of step socially, while William had never learned to care. Returning to the United States at the age of twenty-one, Norbert lectured at Harvard for a time. At his father’s urging he became a math teacher at the University of Maine, where he was miserable. A series of unsatisfactory jobs followed. Norbert did not find any happiness until 1919, when he took a post teaching math at MIT. Clearly, Norbert’s observation still held true: Just because the boys were prodigies did not mean they had anything else in common. At the time that William Sidis took up a double life as his solution to the pains of his existence, Norbert settled into a respectable job at MIT. Leaving philosophy behind, he slowly began what would become a brilliant career in mathematics and science. Equally important, Norbert began to court the woman who would become his wife, Margaret Engemann, a language professor. Norbert had had one previous girlfriend, of whom his family did not approve, and they humiliated him mercilessly until the couple broke up. “Family ridicule,” he wrote sadly, “was a weapon against which I had no defenses.” The fact that his family approved of Margaret and pressured him intensely to marry her disturbed both the young lovers, and made them unduly cautious. “A courtship that might end in marriage,” he wrote, “could only be my own and could not represent a decision imposed on me by parental authority.” Furthermore, Norbert believed, his parents saw Margaret as someone who would “serve as a ready instrument for holding me in line,” and “they supposed that my marriage with Margaret would mean an indefinite prolongation of my family captivity.” Happily, none of this was so, and theirs was a true love match. But there were other problems—the beginning of their honeymoon was spent at a depressing, musty New York hotel that had been the headquarters of the American Mathematical Society; and during their European honeymoon they were joined by Norbert’s parents. Just when the couple most needed to be alone, Norbert faced the sorry realization that “I had become too emotionally dependent on my parents to ignore their summons.” In his autobiography, Norbert wrote frankly of this problem in his marriage, stating that it was many years before he overcame his parents’ domination, and that their “policy of glossing over my emotional difficulties” made his struggle for independence all the more difficult. This problem, in a nutshell, is common to many prodigies, and like other prodigies, Norbert credited his marriage with defrosting him emotionally. He wrote, “I wish no reader to draw the conclusion that my emotional life has been restricted to my scientific career, or that I could live with any satisfaction without the loyalty, affection, and continued support of my lifelong companion.… I cannot express how my life has been strengthened and stabilized by the love and understanding of my partner.” Had Martha Foley returned William’s passion as Margaret did Norbert’s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. The same year that Norbert married, Martha definitely cast her lot with a man whom she had met in San Francisco, a troubled young writer named Whit Burnett. Unlike William, Whit had no interest in Martha’s great passions—politics, socialism, and feminism —but he shared her other love, writing. Martha returned to New York and set up housekeeping with Whit. He got a job at The New York Times, she at the Daily Mirror. According to friends, William treated this development as if it didn’t exist. Martha still saw him socially, but without Whit, and William did not attempt to prevail over Martha—he simply avoided discussion of the interloper and carried on as before, but without the kisses. In 1927, Martha and Whit moved to Paris. William did not see Martha again for five years. As before, William bore his unrequited love cheerfully, continuing to talk about Martha and show the photograph that he carried for the rest of his life. In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert’s response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives. This was dramatically true in the case of that other great prodigy, John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill’s father was a more ferocious version of Leo Wiener. Intensely critical and cold, James Mill lavished continual attention on his prodigy son, but never affection. Like Norbert, John did not rebel overtly against his oppressive father. Instead, his inner pressures led to a kind of nervous breakdown at the age of twenty. Outwardly, he went through the motions of his busy intellectual schedule; inwardly he was morose and empty. He had lost the ability to feel—neither poetry, nor music, nor even his favorite books, inspired any real emotion in him. He had lost his former zeal for the altruism his father had taught him, and no longer felt excitement at the thought of reforming mankind and bettering the lot of millions of Hindus. If he did not learn to feel in a year’s time, John decided, he would commit suicide. To his despair, he discovered that his mood did not crack under rigid self-analysis, the only tool his father had given him. Sadder still, he could not think of a single person to confide in. His father was the last person he would consider approaching—not only was John afraid of him, but he was also, paradoxically, afraid of making James Mill feel like a failure. After suffering this depression for some six months, John’s first breakthrough came when he was moved to tears while reading a sentimental book. A passion for Wordsworth’s poetry followed, and a hunger for all things emotional. He recovered, and resumed his furious work pace. While he never declared any outright opposition to his father, he realized that he needed emotion to supplement his father’s brand of arid, dour rationality. At the age of twenty-four, John met an intellectual, sympathetic, married woman, Harriet Taylor, and they began an emotional, though not a sexual, affair. When her husband died twenty years later, the lovers were finally married. Though less perfectly satisfying than Norbert Wiener’s marriage, John Mill’s unconventional love affair did much to synthesize his feelings and his intellect. Furthermore, the liaison was such an assault upon Victorian mores that it served as a satisfactory, if indirect, rebellion against James Mill, who heartily disapproved of his son’s coveting another man’s property. Leo Wiener and James Mill were both unlike Boris Sidis in that they were verbally abusive of their sons, harshly criticizing the boys when they failed to conform properly. However, there is a crucial similarity that runs through the upbringing of the three—all of the boys reached young manhood with a feeling of helplessness and inability in regard to handling the practicalities of life, and all knew their parents were to blame. John Mill’s mother left her son’s training so wholly to her husband that the boy never learned to take care of himself in trivial, domestic ways. James Mill regarded his son’s ineptitudes with scorn. Wrote John bitterly, “The education which my father gave me, was in itself much more fitted for training me to know than to do…. There was anything but insensibility or tolerance on his part towards such shortcomings: but, while he saved me from the demoralizing effects of school life, he made no effort to provide me with any sufficient substitute for its practicalizing influences. Whatever qualities he himself, probably, had acquired without difficult or special training, he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire as easily… he seems to have expected effects without causes.” What shades, here, of William Sidis’s not being taught to tie his shoelaces! The mistake of these parents of prodigies, then, was to assume that their children, with their marvelous brains, would absorb the commonsense details of life as easily as they would their Latin declensions, and with less need of instruction. Of these three prodigies, William, though by far the most outcast by society, and appearing to be the greatest failure, was at this stage in life finding the greatest happiness. He had hit upon a strategy—the double life—which served him well, and he was both productive and satisfied with his daily existence. If he had found a reciprocal love as had Norbert Wiener and John Mill, he too would have had the advantage of a richer emotional life. But more important, he had rebelled against his parents for all he was worth, and reaped enormous benefits from it. He had no morose depressions or restless years spent following his parents’ plan—he was his own man, however odd, however eccentric, however unorthodox. 13 The Peridromophile One of the most extraordinary events in William Sidis’s extraordinary life was the publication of his second, and last published, book, a year after the appearance of The Animate and the Inanimate. A very small edition of Notes on the Collection of Transfers was published in 1926 by Dorrance and Company, a Philadelphia vanity press, with William’s inheritance money. Most of the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and today the book is extremely rare. This work is arguably the most boring book ever written, and as every bibliophile knows, the competition is fierce. It unquestionably placed him among the foremost ranks of literary eccentrics. Of course, literary history abounds with unusual books. Before Sidis arrived on the scene, there had been a volume entitled Nothing by Methela which contained two hundred blank pages. In 1634, Charles Butler published The Feminin Monarchi, a history of bees written in phonetic spelling. In 1802, there appeared A Pickle for the Knowing Ones by Timothy Dexter, composed of a single sentence unmarred by even one instance of punctuation (in a second edition, all the punctuation was grouped together on the last page). And after Sidis’s book, in 1939, there came Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, a complete fifty-thousand-word novel written without the single use of the letter e. William selected a peculiar pseudonym—Frank Folupa. Choices of pseudonyms are rarely arbitrary, and given William’s near perfect command of hundreds of languages and dialects, it is tempting to look for meanings in his choice of a name. Folle is French for “crazy”; lupa is Latin for “she-wolf”—could William have been calling himself a crazy wolf? Certainly, anyone picking up Notes on the Collection of Transfers might find this an accurate pen name. The work, as its title indicates, was devoted entirely to William’s beloved hobby of streetcar-transfer collecting. His passion for public-transit systems began when he was a toddler. A pair of Harvard professors visited the Sidis home and found the two-year-old poring over maps of greater Boston. Little pink-cheeked Billy called to his mother, who had just brought him back from a shopping trip. He showed her the maps and pointed out a much shorter route to the area they had just left. When he was five, in 1903, he collected his first transfers; by the time he was in his mid-twenties he had more than 1,600. He corresponded with other collectors, swapped transfers, and even acquired foreign transfers by mail. William successfully memorized hundreds, if not thousands, of transit routes throughout the United States. Among his friends and relatives, stories abounded of his startling ability to give transit advice. On one occasion, a friend of Jack Goldwyn’s wanted to know about a train leaving Boston. “I said, ‘Now look, Frank—I got a cousin who knows a lot of stuff, maybe he knows that garbage.’ So I asked Billy, and he said, ‘Sure, there’s a train leaving so and so from Boston.’ And he told Frank there was a dining car and a sleeping car.” When a friend of Helena’s wanted to go to Cleveland from Boston, she gave William the name of the street that was her destination. “He told her exactly what buses to take, and connecting buses and where to get them. She was just amazed. How he knew places all over the country, without having been to them, is really almost fantastic.” In his spare time, William composed lengthy transit guides: The Transfer Guide to the District of Columbia, The Transit Guide to the Northwest Suburbs of Boston, etc. According to his friend Julius Eichel, “Most people had preconceived notions that similar city guides were already in existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. With painstaking thought and logic he had evolved a system whereby anybody could, by looking at the part of the city he wanted to reach, see at a glance what transit facilities to use towards that end. He was constantly studying city transit problems, and solving some quite elegantly, and that without ever having set foot in some of the cities.” There was a persistent rumor that William was offered a job by the Eastern Massachusetts Railway Company, who gave him their most difficult statistical problems to solve. As the story went, he spent an hour surrounded by blueprints, charts, and statistics and was found weeping over the documents. Figures, he purportedly told the company officials, made him ill, and he quit the job. It is difficult to say whether or not this tale is pure fabrication. He did tell his sister that the very sight of a mathematical formula made him ill, so perhaps it is true. On the other hand, where Helena was concerned, he was generous with this type of information. If she had a question, particularly about paradoxes (his specialty), he warmly gave her an answer. She seems to be the only one for whom he would make an exception. If he had the slightest sense that anyone was making an exhibition of his abilities, he would clam up completely and pretend uncompromising ignorance. George Gloss, the owner of Boston’s Brattle Bookshop, recalled a trip he made to Seagate, “an exclusive part of Coney Island. They had some kind of a streetcar, and they issued a transfer. Well, I came back triumphantly, and I said, ‘I bet you haven’t got this!’ ‘Oh!’ William says. ‘They just issued that. …’ And he knew all the details.” Gloss knew William only slightly, but one incident in their acquaintance stuck out in his mind: “Once I took him home for dinner. As we were walking, he saw a subway or heard an elevated, and he was … overcome by it. I had never seen such a reaction. Excitement and admiration. Love. For the railroads and the railroad sounds.” In the introduction to Notes on the Collection of Transfers, William advises the reader to begin at the end of the book and work backward, in order to avoid the driest material. This suggestion is sound advice indeed, since Part I consists of seven stultifying chapters, proceeding from the merely boring to the staggeringly dull. The topics covered are: I. Transfers in General; II. Transfer Privileges; III. Fares; IV. Reversibility; V. Fare Limits and Overlaps; VI. Circumstances of Issue; and VII. Systems and Subsystems. What, one cannot resist asking, remains? A great deal, since Part I represents only 69 pages out of 305. Part II is titled Contents of Transfers, and delves deeply into the following subjects: VIII. Transfer Tickets; IX. Transfer Forms; X. Dating of Transfers; XI. Transfer Time Limits; XII. The Half-day on Transfers; XIII. Routes; XIV. Transfer-Issuing Units; XV. Conditions of Place; XVI. Miscellaneous Conditions; XVII. Standard Types; and XVIII. Coloring of Transfers. Part II, despite the bludgeoning dullness of most of the material, contains bits of charm. A wry comment here and there; or a note of melancholy philosophy, when writing of obsolete transfers not immediately withdrawn from usage: “Such forms … which are vestiges of former transfer privileges, are called vestigial forms.… Vestigial transfer forms have the same interest as other vestigial remnants—objects, manners, actions, that are entirely disconnected from their present surroundings, and are simply survivals of a bygone past.” If the reader makes it to Part III, Collecting Transfers (or has taken the author’s advice and begun there), he will be amply rewarded, for at last the going gets good, so to speak. After a tolerable chapter, Collection in General, the reader comes to one of the most interesting parts of the book, the chapter titled Derelict Transfers. “What is a Derelict? By the expression ‘derelict transfers’ I mean the discarded transfers frequently found lying about, abandoned by their rightful owners.” These abandoned transfers, Sidis stressed, form an important source for the dedicated collector, and their acquisition and treatment is described in rather tender detail: Handling Derelicts. The collector picking up derelict transfers should do it as inconspicuously as possible, and should generally not let it be noticed that that is what he is doing. Although picking up a derelict for a souvenir to put in a collection is a perfectly legitimate action in itself, still it would hardly do to appear as one who picks up rubbish, or especially as one who is trying to pick up transfers to evade payment of carfare. Wet transfers can be kept in a special pocket for a while, and will dry fairly rapidly. In any case, when unfolding a transfer, especially a wet one, care should be taken not to tear the transfer itself in the process. If a transfer is dirty, it is best not to keep it where it is liable to soil clean ones, especially if it is wet. Wet transfers are often found adhering closely to the pavement, and there special care is needed to avoid tearing, especially if there is already a slight tear. Where there are attached coupons, these are quite likely to come off if care is not observed. Sometimes the process of detaching such transfers can be done very effectively, and quite inconspicuously, too, with the point of an umbrella, which can also be used to pick up the transfer if handled properly. [Sidis constructed his own litter stick—a stick with a pointed metal end attached to it, rather like the kind streetcleaners used.] Snow will very frequently keep them frozen in all winter, and many derelict transfers can be found under a deep layer of snow; these may be treated essentially as ordinary wet transfers, but great care should be used if they have to be taken out of ice, in which case it may be best to break off the whole piece of ice and let it melt. The proper storage, labeling, and indexing of the collection is a matter of many pages, including detailed instructions on how to make envelopes in which to store the transfers, complete with a diagram. The next chapter is titled Local Exploration, and details the advantages of transfer-hunting as an aid to gaining knowledge of a city; and indeed, Sidis makes a very good case for his thesis: The transfer collector, besides the information acquired from reading and analyzing the inscriptions on transfers, gets a thorough and firsthand knowledge of more details of his city and its vicinity than the average inhabitant would be likely to get … other inhabitants or visitors will not see the city so much as a whole. A city and its environs will thus appear to the transfer collector not merely as on a map, but rather as a dynamic map, one into which some life and motion has been put. … If a city is passed through on a train, the parts seen are anything but characteristic, since the neighborhoods about a railroad track are apt to be rather run down in appearance. The opposite will be true of the city as seen from an auto, which will be principally from the point of view of the boulevards. But the local transportation lines will take in everything, business sections and all other types of sections of the city and suburbs.… This in itself should be enough to lend some interest to the collection of transfers. In the final and most intriguing chapter, Miscellaneous Items of Interest, William stated his case for the hobby, allowing that “it is hardly fair to assume that the reader will be interested in collecting streetcar transfers, since such a hobby is, to say the least, a rare one.” However, he cited a number of advantages to collecting, such as that of visiting historical sites, and the pleasure to be derived from “arithmetical or statistical figuring … in connection with the calculation of car indexes.” As if this were not inducement enough, William wooed his readers with, of all things, “Transfer Humor”: “According to this story a man applied for admission at the gates of St. Peter, and was told to go to the other place. He immediately replied: ‘Gimme a transfer.’ ” Another went: “It is said that a Harvard College student got on a streetcar, and wishing an extra ride, asked the conductor for a transfer. When asked where to, he said, ‘Anywhere.’ The conductor winked and said, ‘All right, I will give you a transfer to Waverley.’ The student was afterwards laughed at when he told the story, and was informed that the asylum for the feeble-minded was located at Waverley.” A little transfer poetry followed the jokes. First, an excerpt from the eleven-year-old William’s ode to the opening of the Cambridge Subway. And then, “an extract from a verse in the form of a Mother Goose Alphabet to explain the letters on the cars of the Los Angeles Railway. A is for Adams, well-known man of state. B is for Brooklyn, that borough so great. C is for Crown Hill, or Crooked, maybe. D is for Depot, where stops the Espee. E is for Eagle Rock, towards the north. F on the top of a car stands for Fourth. In conclusion, William wrote: One thing in which the collection of transfers differs from other kinds of collection, is that such collection can never be commercialized, since trading in transfers is illegal, being presumably fraudulent even where there is no specific law in regard to transfers as such. Therefore, collectors must always be amateurs, collecting for the intrinsic interest in it; the professional collector cannot very well appear in this field, nor would it be desirable that he should. The collector of transfers will, therefore, not be faced by the problem of the stamp collector of issues printed exclusively for sale to collectors and not for circulation. While any number of passages from Notes on the Collection of Transfers lend themselves to psychological interpretation, it is perhaps this last speech that is the most revealing. Since William’s very genius was “commercialized” from his earliest childhood—by his mother in her eager display of him, by his father in Philistine and Genius, and most of all by the press, who used him for reams of good copy at the expense of his feelings and who continually urged him to commercialize his genius in adulthood by offering it up to society—the deep love of a truly, eternally amateur hobby is a symbolic cry for freedom from exploitation. Kathleen Montour, in her perceptive article on Sidis in American Psychologist magazine, made the same mistake that many others had made in analyzing this odd book. She wrote, “Unlike Notes on the Collection of Transfers, The Animate and the Inanimate is a serious treatment of a scientific topic; it involves the philosophy of science. The contrast in the content of these two reflects the change that Sidis underwent, from scholar to cynical eccentric, hostile to intellectualism.” In fact, there is nothing cynical about Notes. On the contrary, it is its very innocence that is bizarre; to present a passionate work about a hobby that would certainly appear absurd to most people, even if done pseudonymously, takes a little bit of courage and a great deal of enthusiasm. Dan Mahony, a political psychologist who has been studying Sidis’s writings, observes: “A hobby is a very idealistic activity. I think what Sidis is doing is exploring the borderline between work and play. The average person is an expert in their hobby; because they think it’s a hobby, it keeps the academes at bay—if it’s a hobby, it’s not official and it’s okay to have it. But there are experts in hobbies that are better than most college professors. You’re free to think within your hobby. And Sidis is saying, ‘In your hobby, you’re free to be a perfectionist.’ In September 1926, William began a monthly publication for transfer collectors, titled The Peridromophile, available at ten cents an issue or one dollar per year. This unlikely magazine ran for six and a half years, resurfacing under several more titles in the years that followed. The first issues featured columns on predictably dry topics, such as the written matter (usually advertisements) featured on the backs of transfers, special “revival issue” transfers and their peculiarities, etc. A regular contributor to The Peridromophile was one Mr. M. W. Nash, who drew a monthly cartoon chronicling the adventures of “General Phorm,” who cavorted with a transfer-stabbing stick and a collector’s box slung over his shoulder. To add to the levity, there was a regular humor column, called “Railery,” featuring William’s latest collection of bad transit jokes, such as the following: “Excuse me, does this train stop at Reading?” “Yes; get off one station before I do.” “Oh, thank you.” CONDUCTOR: This transfer has expired, madam. LADY: I don’t blame it a bit. This streetcar is so poorly ventilated. Overheard on the Boston streetcar during the 6 P.M. rush hour: “We are in a jam. Heaven preserve us!” A man was seen walking a car track—an old, abandoned line—and gazing intently at the rails. A bystander called out to him: “Hey, what are you doing there?” “Why, I’m a detective!” “What are you looking for?” “The president of the streetcar company.” “Well, you don’t expect to find him here, do you?” “No, but I’m on his track, anyhow.” In 1927, one year after William launched The Peridromophile and authored Notes, the Boston Sunday Post published an article titled “ ‘Fourth Dimension Sidis’ Becomes Peridromophile—Not as Bad as It Sounds, Though; Harvard’s Mathematical Genius Collects Street Car Transfers.” In a warm-hearted review of Notes, the reporter says, “Be a Peridromophile! It’s the very latest fad—so new that only one man has taken it up.… Think of the strangest things you have ever heard of a collector amassing. And then decide that William James Sidis, the former Brookline boy prodigy of Harvard, has started the queerest collector’s fad you or anyone else has ever heard of.” The reporter gave special attention to the streetcar poetry and jokes, remarking amicably, “The readers must understand that transfer collecting isn’t old enough to have gathered many good ones, so a little indulgence.” Sixteen years later a second article on the subject appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun. Titled “Peridromophily and Mr. Willie Sidis,” it was authored by one James P. Connolly. His column was subtitled “Bus Correspondent’s Apology,” for he had made an error in a previous column. While reporting on the passing of the Charles Street bus line, he had hobnobbed with some of the assembled crowd and was informed (or so he thought): “We’re philomorphilists—like philatelists, only, instead of stamps, we collect streetcar transfers.” Mr. Connolly considered the whole business a joke, but when he wrote a column about it, he received his comeuppance. The president of the Baltimore Transit Company sent him a copy of the Frank Folupa opus, thus setting him straight about the hobby, and its adherents’ proper name. Peridromophile, he discovered, came from the Greek—the prefix peri- means “around” or “about”; the suffix -dromos means “running track” or “course”; and the suffix -philos, “dear, friendly, loving.” In conclusion, wrote Connolly, “The Evening Sun’s Bus Correspondent herewith makes a sweeping apology to ‘peridromophiles’ all over the world. He is heartily sorry for ever having thought of them as ‘philomorphilists.’ ” Notes on the Collection of Transfers was the subject of only these two reviews—not many, but curiously, two more than The Animate and the Inanimate received. 14 The Double Life Despite William’s dedication to his unconventional hobby, it remained just that—a hobby, an occupation for his spare time, a relaxation for his racing mind. He was busy at all times with at least a half-dozen serious writing projects, in addition to his regular workaday job. He appeared to have the energy and zeal of ten men, and the decade between his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays was his most productive. Despite his ceaseless activity, he was usually under financial strain, receiving small loans from friends. After publishing Notes on the Collection of Transfers, he had invested almost his entire four-thousand-dollar inheritance into bus stocks. It was a sound enough plan, since many bus companies thrived in the 1920s. “His principles prevented him from living extravagantly,” explained Julius Eichel, “but he was looking forward to the day when he could use the nest egg from his investment to start the cooperatives he was always planning. Financial manipulation carried on by the parent bus company resulted in his being squeezed out of his holdings, and he suffered a complete loss of his inheritance. He had not enjoyed a penny of it.” By the late ’20s the stocks were, in the words of Helena Sidis, “little more than wallpaper.” Consequently, William took job after job that he hoped would preserve his anonymity and leave him free to do his life’s work after office hours. Yet he was unable to settle into a single, satisfactory employment. Most of his jobs were procured for him by friends, or came from passing civil service examinations, and paid fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week. (William scored so high on these exams that he was frequently offered managerial positions, which he turned down in horror.) Almost invariably, William lost these jobs after a matter of months. One of his main difficulties in acquiring a job was his utterly nonconformist appearance. The following description, which was written by Eichel and applies to Sidis in his late thirties and forties, gives a good overall impression: Sidis was as indifferent to his personal appearance as was Samuel Johnson in an earlier age. But he suffered more than Johnson for this, for whereas Johnson was the literary leader of the groups then congregating in coffeehouses, Sidis had no such admirers, and few could overlook his careless appearance and uncouth manners. The result was that first appearances would shut out his genius to those who met him casually. Sidis was about five feet, eight inches tall, stocky and broad boned, and weighed about 220 pounds. In appearance and habits he could have passed for a longshoreman rather than a white-collar worker, yet he insisted that the only work he was fitted for was that of operating a comptometer in an office. That incongruity made it difficult for him to get such office work, and that was at the root of his financial troubles. No one could complain about his work; it was accurate and efficient, and he would be asked to locate mistakes that others would make. If only he had paid more attention to cleanliness and his distasteful habits. But in spite of friendly advice he could not overcome such weaknesses. He wore a dirty old cap, musty with age. He always seemed to need a shave, although he did not cultivate a beard. His trousers were unpressed and dirty, and his shoes always remained unshined, when he wore shoes. In later years he wore ordinary gym sneakers, with socks in winter, and without socks in summer. His coat was ragged, with the lining usually showing where the stitches or wear had loosened it from the cloth. His tie was usually cut six inches from the knot, and usually dirty. In an age when dress and appearances count for so much, his carelessness was an obvious handicap. Another extraordinary account of Sidis on the job appeared in The Come As You Are Masquerade Party, author Samuel Rosenberg’s collection of essays. Rosenberg was told the following story by Edward T. (“Ted”) Frankel, an auditor who worked in the same office with William: In 1928 the National Industrial Conference Board, a research organization, hired Sidis to operate a Burroughs calculating machine for $25 a week. At first, he managed to keep his story secret, but when it was discovered that he knew higher mathematics he was immediately offered some advanced work with the promise of more money. But Sidis, who had been through the same situation before, stubbornly refused and stayed with his calculator. “He was good with that machine,” said Frankel. “So remarkably good, in fact, that his immediate supervisor, J. M. Robertson, became obsessed with the idea that Sidis was really performing all his calculations mentally and only pretending to operate the machine to throw him off the track! A hilarious Charlie Chaplin comedy developed, with Robertson watching Sidis like a hawk but pretending not to, and Sidis pretending not to know that Robertson was watching him. But it was no match. Sidis ran that machine right under Robertson’s nose so cleverly that Robertson never knew what in hell was going on.” While Sidis was employed at the NICB, according to Frankel, several experts in the organization tried to involve him in discussions of mathematics or philosophy, but he insisted angrily that he had forgotten everything that he had known. “But on one occasion he slipped,” said Frankel. “Somebody showed him a new set of tables that had been prepared by some of our top experts as an aid in solving certain complicated statistical problems. The tables were useful but admittedly incomplete. Sidis studied them for a while and suggested a simple way of eliminating all the difficulties. It was obvious that he had forgotten nothing. After that brilliant demonstration, the pressure on Sidis to conform increased, he began to look and behave like a trapped animal, and he finally resigned. “I really felt terribly sorry for him. He was like a child. He told me that he didn’t know how to apply for another job and that it was useless to write letters of application because they were all thrown in wastebaskets. He really needed help. I spent many of my lunch hours going around to the offices of the big companies around Grand Central station trying to find a job for him. I told the office managers that Sidis was a wizard, but, since I knew that they would discover his story (people always did), I had to tell them that he was only interested in a subsistence job and that he would refuse any promotions. When they heard that, they said that they were definitely not interested. They didn’t want to have a man like that around.” The following tale was told by Grace Spinelli, whose husband Marcos was one of William’s dearest friends. Mrs. Spinelli said simply, “Frankly, we didn’t care whether he bathed or not. Whether he ate one way or the other. We liked him for what he was. It had nothing to do with the surface behavior—we didn’t care about that. My husband called him ‘Pop,’ because he said, ‘He was my intellectual father.’ ” Marcos and William struck up their acquaintanceship in an unconventional manner, according to Grace: “Marcos knew him before we were married. He met him on his job on Wall Street, where Sidis was working for a spiritual publishing house. My husband was out of work, and someone sent him there for a job. “They met in the men’s room. There was Sidis in the men’s room with stacks of newspapers. He would buy them in the subway and lock himself in. He’d be in there for hours, reading his papers. And they just happened to say hello to each other. And Bill said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And Marcos said, ‘Well, I’m applying for a job, but I don’t know anything about finances.’ “You know how it is. Somebody refers you to somebody. Marcos eventually got the job through a friend, but he was embarrassed. He said, ‘What am I gonna do? I don’t know anything about math.’ Math was his weakest subject in school. So Sidis says, ‘I’ll help you out.’ I don’t know what he did. He showed him something. But Marcos was still worried. And William said, ‘I’ll help you. Don’t you worry about it.’ By eleven o’clock, Sidis was through with his work. And of course he didn’t have to use adding machines, but if he did use the adding machines, he added with both his hands, all his fingers—an adding machine for each hand. Sometimes he could do the thing quicker than the machine could do it. By eleven o’clock in the morning he was through, but he wasn’t allowed to go home. He had to stay there, and then he did whatever he wanted to do, because the work didn’t keep piling in. Probably he was writing one of his newsletters. The rest of the staff wouldn’t have anything to do with him. They thought he was weird. “And once, the office was moved from one room to another, and they asked him to move his machines. He wouldn’t do it. He said, I. can’t do it. It’s not good for my health. It’s too heavy for me.’ They insisted that he move his own typewriter and machine, which in those days were heavy, not as streamlined as they are today. And Marcos said William took hold of a stick and said, ‘You come near me, I’ll hit you.’ It was a matter of principle, and he was not going to do anything for which he was not employed. He stuck to his job.” If he would not do more than he was hired for, neither would he pretend to dawdle over his work and stretch it out throughout the day. Often, he completed an entire day’s work in twenty minutes, and in another twenty he would do Marcos’s work and pass it to him under the table. His habit of retiring to the men’s room with a collection of newspapers offended his fellow workers, who complained to their boss. Like the bright student who finishes his schoolwork in twenty minutes and is left twiddling his thumbs in class, William was deeply resented by his coworkers and his employers, and thus lost job after job. When Helena begged her brother to seek another type of employment, he told her, “I just want to work an adding machine, so I won’t have to use my mind on it—I want to use my mind for other things.” There were a great many of these “other things.” One was an organization William founded with a friend in 1929, which he called the Geprodis Association. The meaning of the word Geprodis is a mystery. There was a fourth-century Scandinavian tribe called the Gepidae. Or, perhaps the word was an acronym, or a word in one of William’s invented languages, such as his childhood Vender-good. This association was formed to promote a variety of enterprising business projects, potentially to be run on a cooperative basis. With his passion for constitutions and legal documents, William drew up a fifteen-page “Syllabus Program of the Geprodis Association.” He had mellowed considerably since the days of the fascistic Hesperia Constitution, and this latest, idealistic system attempted to meld communism and democracy. Small groups, no larger than twenty-five, made policy decisions, electing delegates to make decisions in higher-up groups of twenty-five, and so on. Contributions from members outside the organization were welcomed, but moneys made by the businesses under the Geprodis umbrella were to be recycled back into the cooperatives—personal profit to any great degree was discouraged. Despite his visions of expansion, William never got his cooperative venture going on a large scale. He did, however, manage to start a few small businesses under its wing, and published newsletters and other written matter. He wrote a lengthy revision of Robert’s Rules of Order, emphasizing the replacement of traditional parliamentary procedure with group rules tailored to the aforementioned small groups of twenty-five or less. This work, which remained unpublished, was circulated in mimeographed form and was called the “Geprodis Code of Group Procedure.” The organization’s first order of business was to market the perpetual calendar that William had invented at age five. In the years since, William had improved on the device. The difficulty with all perpetual calendars existing at that time concerned leap years. To calculate a day of the week on a leap year involved the consultation of special tables and charts, thus making the devices cumbersome and troublesome to use. William was among the first to conquer this problem, incorporating leap-year calculations into his pocket-size, easy-to-use device. He applied to the U.S. Patent Office, saying that he believed himself to be “the original, first and sole inventor” of the improvement, and was granted his patent. William and a partner, Joseph Resnick, next set about promoting the calendar, employing the services of attorney Hobart S. Bird, who would later see William through a serious legal crisis. Bird negotiated sales contracts with bookstores and private distributors, and in six months the Geprodis Association had sold 1,500 calendars at ten cents each. Sales were brisk in New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago. Sidis and Resnick started a monthly newsletter, the Geprodis Organization News, which advertised The Peridromophile, William’s transit guides, and the perpetual calendar. It also advertised two unusual services. For twenty-five cents, Sidis’s “City Information Service” would supply all the transit information necessary to travel door-to-door between any of fifty major metropolitan cities. For fifty cents, one could purchase the “Itinerary Service,” which provided an itinerary for railroad travel anywhere in the United States or Canada, including any local transit information necessary at the starting point of the journey. The partners then started the Geprodis System Translation Service and the Geprodis Manuscript Library. The latter was based on a clever idea for the circulation of unpublished manuscripts on a lending-library basis, and it must have appealed to any number of struggling authors. The Association printed an attractive circular that read: WRITERS! ATTENTION! IF—You HAVE BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL IN GETTING YOUR WORK PUBLISHED IF—You WOULD LIKE YOUR WORK TO HAVE A FEW READERS WHILE WAITING FOR A PUBLISHER—HERE IS A CHANCE The GEPRODIS MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, now being organized, is looking for unpublished manuscripts only, preferably by unknown writers, for the purpose of introducing them to the public by lending them out on a circulating library basis. Your work can become known to readers—possibly even to publishers in this way. You will get a small royalty—a nominal sum, but more than if your manuscript remained totally idle during the same period. The GEPRODIS MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY is not intended as a regular means of income to its writers. It is intended to bring their work before the public, and serve as a practical test of popularity of works which might otherwise get little or no consideration from publishers. It is intended to rescue from oblivion much good work which is at present passed over by publishers’ critics…. You can lose nothing by it, and you stand a chance of gaining recognition which might otherwise be more difficult to obtain. There is no record of the success of these various projects. The calendar seems to have done moderately well over the years, but judging by the comments of Sidis’s friends, he was never out of financial straits for long. Either his projects were unsuccessful, or he invested what money he made into such a myriad of new enterprises that he saw little profit. For a brief period, he reported on the progress of the various projects in the Geprodis Organization News. The Peridromophile, William explained in the fourth issue, had long endeavored to maintain a neutral editorial policy; given the nature of its contents—transfer trivia—this was not exceedingly difficult. However, A neutral policy was more difficult in the case of G.O.N., its purpose being almost a propaganda purpose by its very nature; and yet, in accordance with Geprodis policy, this paper has become an explanatory organ rather than one which presents definite opinions. It has been alleged by critics that it is impossible, in any statement of facts, to avoid completely all trace of the writer’s opinion; and this is undoubtedly true. But nevertheless, this does not mean that it is impossible to avoid going out of one’s way to air the writer’s opinions; and omission of out-and-out editorials is certainly a possibility. At any rate, such is the variety of new journalism that Geprodis proposes to create. William, the subject of hundreds of opinionated, if not downright slanderous articles and editorials, longed to maintain the utmost objectivity and neutrality when he placed himself in the position of journalist or author. This ardent concern showed itself fully in William’s next magnum opus: a 1,200-page revisionist history of the United States. 15 The Tribes and the States At the same time that William was collecting transfers, running his half-dozen Geprodis projects, and working a nine-to-five job, he was composing a massive manuscript: two volumes describing America from earliest prehistory to the twentieth century. Unfortunately, only six hundred pages—the first book, called The Tribes and the States, and a single page of the second, The Peace Paths—have survived. The tone in which the first volume is written reflects William’s desire to be a perfect, neutral observer and reporter. The single remaining page of The Peace Paths gives fascinating insight into his purpose in the epic work of The Tribes and the States. William wrote: Through all this it is hoped that the reader will never lose sight of the fact that it is all intended to be a story—that it is in no instance the result of any deliberate research—that the atmosphere is lost if you begin to scrutinize evidence in detail—that, even if any considerable part of it turns out to be untrue, the saga can be the basis for a new (and let us hope, finer) tradition of the origin of American ideas and ideals. This tale is hardly an epic of America, and is not intended to be such; but it has the broad legendary type of basis on which such an epic—if one is ever composed—should rest. Kipling once expressed the sources of Homer’s epics as follows: When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre ‘E’d ’eard men sing by land and sea, And wot ’e thought ’e might require ’E went an’ took, the same as me. Our own sources are precisely that; and we claim no better investigation of authenticity, than just that. It is, after all, not a history, but a story, even if some history has crept in unwittingly. We may also warn the reader against supposing that the story deals with “Indian lore,” just because it starts with mention of that race. The very concept of “Indian lore” implies an unbridgeable gulf between the history of the red race and the white people of this continent; and the tale of the Peace Path is an effort to bridge that gap. It deals neither with the red race nor with the white race as such, but deals with America, whoever its people may have been at any time. Though this tantalizing snippet was written for The Peace Paths, the basic point of view is the same as that expressed in the stodgier introduction to The Tribes and the States. Since this latter book is so vast in scope, covering as it does prehistory to the year 1828 in six hundred closely typed pages, it is impossible to go into its contents at any length here. Furthermore, much of it is dry, scholarly, and labored. According to friends of William’s who read it, the second volume was written in a far more popular, accessible style. Since the entire work contains not a single footnote, a frustrated scholar might conclude that the book is in large part speculative fiction mingled with fact. Certainly William was thumbing his nose at academia when he said, “it is in no instance the result of any deliberate research … the atmosphere is lost if you begin to scrutinize evidence in detail,” but William was simply too meticulous a scholar to have made the entire thing up. However, in William’s opinion, the percentage of verifiable truths contained in this book is not nearly so important as its point of view toward American history. William treated his subject with loving detail. The surviving book constitutes an impressive, intelligent, and coherent revisionist history of the American population. The task of verifying William’s stories belongs to historians. A number of modern scholars have dedicated themselves to proving similar theories, and none has heard of William James Sidis. An excellent work, complete with footnotes and an extensive bibliography, is Bruce E. Johansen’s Forgotten Founders, published in 1982 by Gambit Publishers. Johansen, in a concise 126 pages, reaches conclusions remarkably similar to Sidis’s. William’s basic premise is that American history properly begins before the landing of the Mayflower. The inhabitants of America, William stressed, had developed enormously diverse cultures. In 1930, the following remark sounded a note that would come into vogue only in the 1960s and ’70s: The mere fact that their white conquerors have lumped them all together under the incorrect heading of “Indians” does not make them all alike … any statements about customs, forms of government, etc. applying to one red nation would be likely to be false as applied to their neighbors.… The tribes of Indians are considered, not as savages or barbarians who created nothing of importance, but as the real founders of the best and most important parts of modern American institutions. The Tribes and the States, William acknowledged in the introduction, was full of controversial material: There are points of difference from the established text-book view of history, such as: picturing America as a country where popular revolts have been the rule rather than the exception, and even as the origin and inspiration of such revolts throughout the world; describing George Washington, not as the hero of the American Revolution as he is ordinarily considered, but rather as one who had little sympathy with democracy, and finally overthrew by conspiracy the republic the Revolution established; the existence of a First Republic ( John Hancock being its first president) representing the American Revolution, and a Second Republic representing a political counter-revolution.… All these will doubtless be difficult for the average reader to swallow.… To those who have been used to reading into American history the idea that the administration is always right, or that the people always follow the governing power, or that it is un-American for the people to take the law into their own hands, this version of American history might prove somewhat of a shock.… But let us also hope that the new point of view will make the reader “think it over”—that it will excite his interest, and make him reconsider much that he has taken for granted about his country. William made no effort to publish The Tribes and the States, though he did circulate copies to his friends under the guise of a secret society he had founded, the American Independence Society (AIS). There was a close link between the book and the organization, as the society claimed to be the modern exponent of the political philosophy presented in the revisionist history. Since it was a secret society, no account can be made of the membership or its activities—although it appears from surviving correspondence to have been limited to friends and friends-of-friends in the New England area (William had by now moved back to Boston from New York). William wrote a detailed program, or manifesto, for the AIS, along with an account of its origins, a credo, poetry, and other intersociety memoranda. In the AIS’s credo, William wrote: We believe that the right of equality, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, does not mean that all persons are exact duplicates of one another, and does not, cannot, imply any sort of forcible leveling, discipline, or regimentation; for such leveling action can provide no equality except that of equal submission to a superior authority, which is in itself the most flagrant denial of equality, liberty, pursuit of happiness, as well as of the requirement of consent of the governed. Instead, William took “equality” to mean “that no person should derive either reward or punishment from any accident of birth or from any acts of other than himself; … that no person should be granted superior consideration before the law by reason of possession of wealth, control of organizations important to the life of the people, or for any other reason whatever.” This view of individual liberty differs from the ideas William expressed in his constitution for the utopia of Hesperia, wherein every citizen would in effect be a government employee. Clearly, William’s ideas had changed since that first pubescent credo, and since the days of his May Day parade arrest. William probably saw his treatment then at the hands of the authorities and his family as a form of censorship, and he gave that subject special attention in the AIS credo. William made it clear that he did not consider himself unpatriotic because he advocated a new order; on the contrary, he wrote that government by consent of the governed made rebellion just the patriotic thing to do whenever the authorities got out of hand. Harkening again to the Declaration of Independence, he stated that a “government has no rights whatever as against its own people—not even that of self-defense.” While William was trying to make his position clear, he simultaneously took great pains to obscure it. His AIS was so secret that it met in abandoned subway tunnels, and was organized so that no member ever knew the identities of more than nine other members. And whenever he referred to his writings in correspondence, he made it very clear that he was not the author—that he had “heard” from his friends in the Okommakamesit Indian tribe that a meeting was scheduled on such and such a date, or that a new historical fact had been “told” to him for inclusion in his book, or that a certain “John Shattuck” had written some freedom songs, with radical lyrics put to the tune of “Fair Harvard.” In fact, there is no indication that William ever met with anyone of Indian blood. Rather, he selected carefully from among his friends, and “initiated” them into the tribe. With his great love of codes, rituals, and secrets, forming a club of modern-day Okommakamesits suited him to perfection. He liked to hint to friends that he was in touch with a line of direct descendants; and there was a boyishness in his dedication to these rites and rules, adhered to with all the passion of a Tom Sawyer or a Huck Finn. When William told his friend Isaac Rab that members of the group met in the subway, Rab replied acerbically, “Do you meet in telephone booths, too?” William expanded on this theme in conversation with George Gloss, explaining that members met on the subway line from Harvard Square to Park Street, signaling to one another with a secret sign. William also liked to hint that the tribe was a large underground organization, but his friends suspected otherwise. Of the Rab family members, William deemed only fifteen-year-old Ann worthy of initiation. Said her younger brother Bill, “He didn’t select me. I think I was a little too frivolous. My father, no, because he was far too logical. But my sister was closer to him. I was play. She was business.” And so, Ann went with William to an Okommakamesit meeting, expecting to join a large group. To her enormous surprise, the gathering was in a home on Beacon Hill, and consisted of only four or five “Beacon Hilly people—very Waspish. Cultured. Refined. I thought they would be people like Bill!” The next surprise was that the main topic of conversation was an informal discussion of the different types of solitaire; William knew twenty or thirty kinds. When a puzzled Ann tried to question William, he just laughed. She was never invited to another meeting, but she continued to receive excerpts from The Tribes and the States. Ann concluded that the tribe was similar in spirit to the Druids of England. “They’re certainly not the descendants of the original Druids, and Bill certainly wasn’t an Indian. But he was a spiritual descendant of the Okommakamesits.” Julius Eichel, too, was invited to be an AIS initiate. “My wife, Esther, and I were the subject of one of Bill’s initiations. It lacked atmosphere—only the three of us were present—and we did not show too much enthusiasm for the event. He had a secret sign which we could exhibit to the initiated, a method of indicating danger by sign language, and an oath to remain true to the principles of the organization. We were willing to go through that for the sake of getting things started, but they never seemed to prosper. We eventually resigned from the organization. His secrecy was too much for us.” To one degree or another, many of William’s friends and relatives thought he suffered delusions of persecution. Given that his political activities were so radical and that most of his acquaintances did not know the extent of them, his fear, as Eichel said, “had some foundation” and may have appeared exaggerated at times when it was legitimate. Even bearing this in mind, however, there is no doubt that William had a strong streak of neurotic fear in his makeup. As Clifton Fadiman stated, “He was very radical. He was afraid of authority, he evaded all symbols of authority. And because he’d had a traumatic experience, the May Day arrest, he was scared. So there was both evasion and fear. But I think the fear was part of a generalized fear of living, of the world in which the rest of us live—that world seemed to him to be full of threatening objects. I think he was afraid of everything. Not in the sense of being a physical coward. Rather that the human race was an alien kind of life that he couldn’t adjust to.” As a result of his obsession with anonymity, William’s friends were often confused. Obviously he was the prime mover behind his publications, but what could they say to his protestations? In several letters to Eichel, William stressed that he had not authored The Tribes and the States. “I have got hold of three more copies of The Tribes and the States, and sent them to you, as you ordered. I do wish it to be understood that, as the pamphlet states in the introduction, it is not to be considered the work of any individual, but of an organization. I may have helped on it, but I certainly do not wish to be considered the author, as there are lots of things that I would not care to take personal responsibility for; so please do not represent the pamphlet to anyone as my work.” His efforts reached comic proportions. He circulated a newspaper purported to be written by the Okommakamesits, called the Penacook Courier. This paper demonstrated his interest in languages and dialects, as it was written in the English dialect spoken around New England at the time of the Revolution. The Penacook Courier pretended to be a current periodical of that time, with datelines of January 1621, June 1774, etc. He wrote to Eichel, “That tribal organization just surprised me by sending—from some place in New Hampshire I never heard of before—an historical newspaper written in American, and which seemed to be good and exciting stuff. Hope they can keep it up.” The Penacook Courier told stories from The Tribes and the States in journalistic form. Although the language reads humorously, William tried to communicate his revisionist ideas seriously. Under the protection of the anonymity provided by the fictional authorship, William felt free to write about his most controversial historical interpretations. George Washington, generally viewed as a national hero, was to William an enemy of the democracy being built by the Americans. From the Penacook Courier, this flash: “Congress just appointed a commander-in-chief for the buncha rebel fighters beseigin Boston. He’s George Washington, who’s botherin Congress by too much Tory talk, so they’re gettin ridda him that way an sendin him to Cambridge. He’s gotta bitta reputation for knozin fightin.” William was understandably shy of openly inciting rebellion himself, though that was clearly what he was hoping would follow from the spread of his American independence ideas. He was particularly inspired by a rebellion against Sir Edmund Andros, governor of New England. Andros frequently marched his Redcoat troops through the streets of Boston as a show of power. On one spring day in 1689, wrote William in The Tribes and the States, Andros marched proudly down the Cornhill, but, on turning the corner into King street, suddenly found himself face to face with a defiant mob.… The governor shouted orders to fire into the crowd; but the crowd’s reserves in the buildings started pouring out into the street … and the militia were seized and disarmed before they could have time to take aim. Sir Edmund Andros himself was also seized by the crowd, and … he was promptly hustled in [jail], while Bradstreet, the last Puritan governor, was found and hailed as the new governor of Massachusetts, and he was installed in the Province House the next day. William’s commentary on this rebellion aptly sums up his hopes and motivations for the fledgling American Independence Society: It has very rarely happened in the world’s history that a powerful administration was so speedily and completely overthrown; and it probably could never have happened without the self-reliant population guided by a secret organization unknown even to the rebels, such as was the case in Massachusetts then. Once again New England proved itself a center of the fight for liberty. William had always loved the New England legend of “The Gray Champion” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. In 1938, he penned a curious document in which he obliquely hinted that he was the actual incarnation of the mysterious Gray Champion, “an earthly representative of [his] spirit.” According to this legend, the Gray Champion was a mythical character who appeared at key moments in the history of the young American nation. He would incite the patriotic spirit in the hearts of Americans and then vanish into thin air when his leadership was no longer required. William’s version of the legend has it that “The Modern Gray Champion” was present at the Andros Rebellion, and again at the Boston draft riots of 1917. William also credited the Gray Champion with founding, in 1936, a movement that bears an unmistakable resemblance to William’s own AIS group. 16 Friends and Relatives William’s elaborate, absurd ruses of anonymity, which probably fooled no one, were absolutely necessary to his peace of mind. If he made his friends promise not to name him as the author of his works, he would never, he hoped, attract the attention of an inquisitive reporter. And he could continue to disseminate his radical ideas. There were other, stranger ruses. In one letter to Eichel he stated, “Took another Civil Service exam, and was informed that I passed the state clerical exam, and am No. 254—not so encouraging.” How could William James Sidis possibly score as low as 254th on a Civil Service exam? Either he botched it on purpose, so as not to draw attention to himself, or he was having fun with Eichel. Two months later, in January 1935, Eichel wrote sternly to William: “We hope that you are still employed. If it depends on ability, you should be able to hold down your job. As for having a reputation which you cannot live up to, this is a burden which many of us with less ability must be willing to shoulder. None of us is perfect, not even on demand. If we get along at all it is because of luck and the willingness to struggle with responsibilities that are thrust on us.” Less than a month later, William began a letter to Eichel with a rare reference to his childhood drama: “Not so good now. Was fired Jan. 31—as I said, having a reputation makes the situation completely hopeless. Really fired for not being a mental calculator.” What story lay behind this remark? Probably, once again an employer or fellow employee discovered that they shared an office with the former wunderkind, and in the ensuing tension William lost his job. Of William’s many ruses, his denial of his mathematical genius was the most outlandish, and the most intensely adhered to. Friends and relatives nearly all tell the same tale: “He would always deny that he had any ability for anything but running a comptometer” (Eichel). “He completely denied any knowledge of math” (Ann Feinzig). “You know the greatest phobia he had? He absolutely resented anybody who told him that he was a good mathematician. He resented being referred to as an expert, or anything like that. He would deny it” (Rab). “Of all things, he didn’t want anything to do with math … because that was his talent. He resented it. It was one of the things that had been exploited. This is what he led us to believe” (Grace Spinelli). In Helena’s opinion, this distaste for mathematics “was probably something in Harvard itself and not anything my father did. Because he also took an aversion to law. And he always maintained that he was a normal person and not a genius —and he didn’t want people coming to his place and asking him questions.” William made exceptions for certain of his friends. Helena enjoyed talking about mathematical paradoxes, so they discussed them at length, and he seemed to relax completely and relish the subject. He willingly gave legal advice, especially to Julius Eichel, who was on trial for draft resistance. He helped Ann and Bill Rab with their math homework, though as before, he could never explain how he arrived at his answers. Said Ann, “It could be that he really couldn’t tell me how, or he just didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that he could. Now if it came to something like a historical theory, he would just say, ‘Well, it’s a story. Either you believe it or you don’t.’ ” If the topic was a less sensitive one, he could be a gold mine of facts. Len Feinzig, Ann’s husband, recalled, “I did a paper on the Federal Reserve Bank and he had information in his head I’d have to spend hours looking up.” William discussed The Animate and the Inanimate with his sister and with both Isaac Rab and his son, Bill, though he rarely discussed it with anyone else. It’s not surprising that the Rabs were privy to conversation that William withheld from others—they were among his favorite friends. He visited them nearly every Sunday, appearing on their doorstep unannounced. Much as they loved Bill Sidis, the family could not always welcome him. As Bill Rab explained, “There were two or three occasions in which we were expecting company, and it would have been very awkward. Because Bill was not the kind of guy who would fit into a social group. He never came announced, and I don’t think he had a phone. So a few times we pretended not to be home.” For the most part, the visits were a pleasure for one and all. The head of the household was the distinguished Socialist Isaac Rabinovitz (the family took the name “Rab”), whose wife and two children, Bill and Ann, were great friends of William’s. “Rab,” as Isaac was affectionately called, held an informal weekly salon in his home, dubbed “The Headquarters” by Boston leftists. The atmosphere was lively, yet William’s privacy was respected completely. No one ever pressed him about his childhood or referred to his genius. He was often invited to stay for Sunday dinner, when he would discuss politics with Rab, Indians with Ann, and physics with Bill, who was in high school. Bill’s colorful memories of these visits prompted him to say, “I wish I could go through it all again—believe me, I’d take notes.” “On the brightest sunny day,” he reminisced, “William always wore a three-piece suit, usually dark, and he’d always carry a raincoat or an overcoat over his arm. I don’t think he ever untied a tie—he’d just take it off, over his head. He wasn’t dirty, though that’s the impression that everybody got. Not unkempt, but careless. He reminded me of a Buddha. Well rounded. He always had his jacket open with his vest buttoned tight. And he always had an ear-to-ear grin, without showing his teeth. “He would arrive with his vest pockets full of illustrated cartoons and jokes clipped out of the Boston Post. And he’d have his pockets pretty well oriented, so he could always pick out the right joke. And if he told you one that he thought was funny, he couldn’t hold back at all—he’d let it all out! He loved a good laugh.” William Fadiman had a slightly less charitable attitude toward his cousin’s sense of humor. “He laughed at his own jokes. He would break out before he finished. He was one of those people who start telling you a funny story and then start laughing. It isn’t funny at all, but they think it’s hysterical.” In addition to his joke-telling, William’s proficiency at crossword puzzles was legend among his friends. Bill Rab remembered the informal competitions that occurred in his home: “He and my father used to have good-natured contests. Once in a while, my father, with a sense of humor, and Bill, with a sense of humor, both with their own self-assuredness, attempted to do The New York Times crossword puzzle. My father would do it in ink, right off the bat. But Bill—Jesus! He would just look at the thing. He had that photographic memory and didn’t have to write down too much. Maybe one letter instead of a word, sometimes in the middle so he wouldn’t lose his place, while he was doing the Downs. But it was mostly done mentally. Then my father would quiz him. ‘What have you got for thirty-six across?’ It was just that one of them hoped he would catch the other in a mistake. They’d ask each other, ‘How did you arrive at that word? Where did you get that information?’ And they’d surprise each other.” From time to time William helped Bill Rab with his homework. “I was particularly stupid in chemistry. I had problems with it in school. But Bill’s approach made it hold some scope. It helped me out a hell of a lot.” William also taught Bill Rab how to make a hectograph. Hectographing was one of the earliest techniques for copying written material, and laborious as it was, William spent hours making copies of his newsletters by this painstaking process, which Bill Rab described: “He had a little pie tin, like a shallow cookie dish, and he put in a gelatinous yellow material, an eighth of an inch deep. The process is similar to a ditto. You type or draw through a carbon onto a piece of paper, put it face down in contact with the hectograph jelly, press it, and leave it for a few minutes. When you lift it up, the analine dye would have transferred to the hectograph jelly. Then you put another piece of paper on top of it, rub it a couple of times, lift it up, and you’ve got an image, the original. It came out purple, just like conventional ditto. This was good for twenty copies or so. That’s how he did every bit of it. He had a very tiny one for postcards. “I took him up in the attic of my house, where I had a simple chemical lab. He and I made my first hectograph up there. We had to make substitutes since I didn’t have all the chemicals. I remember saying, ‘How come you’re using this when you wrote such-and-such down on the formula?’ And he derived a molecular composition of a particular chemical and explained how it would serve the same function. And believe me, he had a wonderful way of expressing this. But to him this was pure play. Fun. He explained other things that kids love—the nature of light refraction, and how the molecular structure of crystals and liquids created different optical illusions. And it wasn’t just chemistry. I’d ask, ‘Why is grass green?’ “And there was history. I was in my junior year of high school and I had to write a book report, and I chose the Boston Tea Party. And Bill says, ‘Oh….’ And I said, ‘Do you know anything about it?’ He replied, ‘Oh, I know a little bit about it.’ I pumped him, and he gave me a little story about the political and economic relationships that were behind the concept of the Boston Tea Party. And I discovered that my school textbook was a highly edited version of the original book, with certain aspects eliminated. So I wrote my report. I got an F! So I said to myself, ‘Holy Jesus! I know I’m right. It all makes sense. If anything, I should have been given credit for doing original research, rather than having stuck to the pat thing.’ “My father went up to school. He was really buddy-buddy with Walter Donne, my headmaster; they were Latin School graduates. They had quite a discussion. I was sitting in the anteroom. Donne came out and he says, ‘Look,’ pretty much man-to-man, ‘we’re dealing with a teacher who only knows one thing, what the textbook says. I’ll let you write the report over again, with another teacher.’ All this was my father’s doing—he was very forceful in his arguments, he had a hell of a lot of charisma. This incident didn’t make me cautious of Bill. Not at all. If anything, it conditioned me never to accept anything on face value just because it’s printed.” Though most of his friends didn’t know it, William wrote a great many short stories, all of which are lost. He did not show them to many people, but one of the exceptions he made was for Bill Rab, who liked the stories immensely. He read two that were centered on Atlantis, and several that could be classified as science fiction. Bill Rab considered them all “well written.… They didn’t have the flavor of contemporary science fiction; they weren’t sophisticated in that respect. But they were convincing, real good stories in themselves. My favorite, favorite, favorite—far and away—was a science fiction story similar to a Jules Verne concept of a time machine. Now Bill didn’t give any preliminaries, any scientific orientation as to why the thing worked. I wish I knew then what I do now about time warps, black holes, parallel existences, because it was pretty much in that vein. It’s about a contemporary man who gets a concept of how to go back in time, I’m not certain about the future. But he was able to go back in time, and picture the social relationships as they once existed. In other words, it was a vehicle for social comment. I didn’t realize that as a kid, I took it as just a well-written story. I had that manuscript for a long, long time—I just wanted to read it over and over again. “Starting in Lorraine, Ohio, this man took several trips into the past, through colonial and Indian days, through the Ice Age, and back through geological eras.” According to Bill Rab, there was one problem in the story’s construction that greatly irked William: “This time capsule was not physically removed from its original geographical location. In other words, if we were to transport back a hundred years, at this moment, we would appear at a very precise longitude and latitude. So the operator of the time capsule had to do research in order to assure that when he went back in time he wasn’t going to wind up in the middle of a mountain, or some body of water. “I don’t know of anyone else who read those stories. My sister wanted to do her homework at the time, so I don’t think she read them. Bill didn’t want me to pass them around. It never entered his head that the ideas would be stolen—it was the possibility that it might get to a newspaper somehow, to some kind of journalist. I was terribly worried about that too.” The company of the Rab household constituted only a small part of William’s social life. Before he moved from New York to Boston in the early 1930s, William saw a great deal of his sister, who was studying sociology at Columbia University. He saw nothing of his mother, who was busy running the Portsmouth mansion as a tourist resort. She lost virtually all of her capital in the stock market crash of 1929, including her daughter’s four-thousand-dollar inheritance, which Helena had been pressured to let her mother invest. Soon Sarah would make a small fortune playing the stock market, more than recouping her losses; but for a time she was in difficult straits. After Helena graduated in 1929, and before the crash, she and her mother had taken a trip to Europe. Helena, at her brother’s request, looked up Martha Foley at the Paris Herald Tribune office, met her, and liked her enormously. Martha and Whit Burnett were married in 1931, and had a son in November. That same year, they also gave birth to the first issue of Story magazine, which was devoted to publishing the short stories of both established and struggling young talents: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, among others. In 1932 Whit and Martha returned to America, bringing Story with them and launching its soon-to-be illustrious American career. They were on their way to popularity, if not fame, and a few years later were well known enough to appear in Current Biography, which described Martha as “a little woman who wears tailored suits and horn-rimmed spectacles and looks like a pleasant young housewife.” Martha had lost none of her charm for William, and although her marriage to Whit was difficult—according to Martha, he was often arrogant and petulant, and they fought—she was not tempted to reconsider William as anything more than a former friend. According to Julius Eichel, they saw each other only once more: “When she returned from Europe with the baby, he wrote asking permission to visit her. He discounted the husband altogether—was not interested in meeting him. Actually, he considered him an interloper who had best be forgotten. He had Martha Foley all to himself at that meeting; he was permitted to fondle the baby, and he had to take leave forever.… I know that Sidis was deeply disappointed at the cold reception and forever sad at the parting. Sidis admitted that her love might have achieved wonders with him, for whereas he might be stubborn with others, there is nothing he would not have done to please her. He carried her photograph with him from 1920 until the day he died, and was always anxious to be asked about it, and would flourish it in the face of any newcomer to arouse a curiosity which he was fast to satisfy on demand. That was the only lady he ever loved, and would admit it, just as readily as he would admit that she did not love him.” There was nothing “he would not have done to please her.” Even, he told Eichel and other friends, break the vow of celibacy he had taken at the age of fifteen. Recalled Eichel, “To direct questioning, Sidis admitted to me that he had no desire for any sex experience. Intellectually, it was distasteful, and he could not think of submitting to that experience unless Martha Foley would demand it. He would do anything to be near her.” Helena affirms this: “We talked a lot about Martha. I’m very sure he was celibate. A relationship, for him, wouldn’t be dependent on sex—he would want people who were as intellectually minded as he was. He did tell me that he never got married because our parents fought so much. “He reminisced about some of the girls at the Rice Institute.… And according to his friend, Marcos Spinelli, he used to do plenty of flirting with the girls in his office, and they smiled back—when Billy told me stories about it, he’d get a twinkle in his eye and he’d laugh. He had a way of going around that Constitution of his.” William paid regular visits to the Spinellis’ apartment in Jersey City. Said Grace, “I never met any of William’s friends. The only name I remember is Martha Foley. Marcos used to tease him about his platonic affair with Martha, and he loved it. Marcos would say, ‘Come on, come on, show me the picture,’ and they’d chuckle. And they’d go through this little routine every time.” In 1980, Martha Foley’s posthumous memoir, The Story of STORY Magazine, was published. William received only a single mention, and parenthetical at that. After explaining that her mother had dedicated a volume of verse to her—the first of many such dedications to Martha—she wrote: “(The second was a volume on higher mathematics, by William James Sidis, the famous and tragic prodigy who was the first boy ever to pay court to me. [The first part of this sentence is incorrect—The Animate and the Inanimate was not dedicated to anyone; perhaps Martha was given an inscribed copy, and she remembered incorrectly some forty years later.] Ready to enter Harvard at the age of nine, he was held back until eleven, became a university professor at fifteen, pioneered discoveries in the fourth dimension, became the focus of international attention, and had his life blasted by notoriety.)” William settled into his bachelorhood, devoting himself, as ever, to his work and his friends. Few of William’s multitude of friends knew each other; many assumed they were his only friends. The Rabs believed this; and certain relatives held the absolute conviction that they were the poor genius’s only link to society. Some lived in New York, others in Boston. William bounced back and forth between the two cities for several years, finally settling in his beloved Boston in the early thirties, evidently no longer afraid of being jailed for his May Day “crimes.” When in Boston, he periodically dropped in at his cousin Elliot Sagall’s home, generally for a quick meal. Like all of William’s hosts, the Sagalls vividly recalled their guest’s eating habits: “He would eat one dish at a time. He would eat the vegetables, then he would eat the potatoes, then the meat. If there was a box of candy, he would finish the whole box.” Conversation was usually light, but occasionally William spoke of his dislike for his mother. “Many times,” recalled Elliot, “he would come and visit and go out the back door when she came in the front door. But he never spoke of his father.” William frequently arrived unannounced at Jack Goldwyn’s home, wearing rubbers and carrying an umbrella, even in fine weather. Jack and his wife, Polly, have fond memories of these visits—they even accepted William’s eating habits, which they referred to as “methodical.” William never spoke to the Goldwyns of his parents. Said Jack, “I never heard him speak in anger about anyone. Billy reminded me so much of his father, but his father’s talents were harvested properly by my aunt Sarah. Now, this Martha Foley, I never saw her, but I was hoping that he would marry her, because she could organize him better.” William told the Goldwyns little of his intellectual life. Jack “pulled a few things out of him”—that he had written a book on Euclidean geometry and another on Atlantis. He never spoke to them of American Indians, or pacifist politics, or streetcar transfers. They had never heard of The Animate and the Inanimate. The main topic of conversation was William’s quest for employment. Jack told him, “Billy, the first thing you do is … well, shave! Be a little bit more acceptable. Take care of your clothes. Look more presentable.” Jack and Polly loved William’s visits, and are proud that he felt comfortable in their home. “He was a very fine person,” insists Polly. “He never bragged. Very humble, gentle, tender. I loved him, but I always felt sorry for him. I felt sorry because here is a genius, and he’s ahead of the world.” Added Jack, “He was always happy! He’d sing songs, and he had the lousiest voice. He’d sing, and recite poetry and hum. Yes, he was a very happy person. He loved people. He had no malice in him—just honesty and integrity.” Like the rest of William’s relations, the Goldwyns were certain that he visited no other relatives. Said Jack, “He never had close contact with any relatives except us—we were the only ones who were any fun. Other relatives didn’t tolerate him. We were the only ones he visited.” Clifton Fadiman was one of the few relations who was convinced that William visited largely to get a good meal and to discuss trivialities. “I don’t think he really trusted us,” said Clifton, “but I thought he had no one else to talk to. In all the time I knew him, Martha was the only one I ever heard him speak of outside of his family.” Making the rounds of family and friends for meals and companionship, William had his favorites. Along with the Rab family, the Spinellis were probably the most beloved. After moving from New York to Boston, William sent Marcos a constant stream of letters—unfortunately, all of these have been lost. But Grace Spinelli’s recollections give us a picture of one of William’s favorite friendships. Marcos was a little-known novelist who wrote more than one hundred books. William read every one of his friend’s novels, and gave him a single book as a present—The Psychology of Laughter by Boris Sidis. Besides literature, the two men talked politics. When Marcos, who was an Italian immigrant, applied for his citizenship, he was asked, “Who was the first President of the United States?” Primed by Sidis, Marcos responded with an elegant lecture about federated America pre-George Washington, startling the judge no end. The Spinellis, of all William’s friends, showed the least concern over his habits and appearance. Grace said, “He was uninhibited in his own way. He belched openly. He wouldn’t take a bath. He smelled badly. He wore sneakers with no socks and he would scratch his legs in the summer. We thought, ‘Well, he’s a brilliant young man and he lives the way he wants to live, so what?’ The question of whether or not William bathed is an exceedingly controversial one among his friends. Many swore he never bathed, and that the stench was brutal. Mrs. Rab once tried to draw a bath for him, and he was infuriated. Occasionally, some poor unfortunate would be delegated by a group of friends to speak to William about bathing. Many insisted that though he was slovenly, he was always clean. Other themes are more consistent. He never told the Spinellis when he was coming, preferring to appear on their doorstep. And he ate his food one item at a time, following the meal with an entire quart of milk, which Grace would sneak out and procure when he arrived, just to please him. He never smoked, never drank liquor, and never drank coffee—just milk, and occasionally a cup of black tea. Naturally, William showed Marcos some of his writings, and Marcos took a special interest in an essay on floods. He gave the article to his agent, along with a few of William’s newsletters, without telling his friend. By accident the papers were returned directly to Sidis, who was shocked and enraged. Marcos insisted, “Really, I was only trying to help you. I thought there was a chance for publication; and you wouldn’t be labeled the Wonder Boy.” William forgave Marcos, but insisted, “We will never talk about this again.” William’s attitude toward the publication of his writings was highly idiosyncratic and variable. He was furious with Marcos; yet in 1934 he wrote to Eichel, “Last summer I started in to write up a ‘Grammar o th’American Lingo,’ and last Sunday I was talking to someone in the Bronx who is going to take it up with Simon & Schuster as to arranging for publishing it.” Three years later he made an effort to have portions of his Atlantis manuscript published by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. William’s friends came from all rungs of the social strata, and his remarkably active social life included a rare diversity of types. In addition to men such as the struggling novelist Marcos Spinelli and the dedicated Socialist Isaac Rab, there were a number of well-to-do sophisticates. One of these was Creighton Hill, head of the editorial department at Babson’s Statistical Office in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, and a wealthy resident of Beacon Hill. Creighton was devoted to William and made unsuccessful efforts to have The Peace Paths published. Coming to the conclusion that what William Sidis needed most was a regular social life—since, like the rest of William’s friends, he assumed he was the only one—he organized a once-monthly meeting, at which Sidis was to lecture on any subject he chose. (William already lectured a few times a year to the Vagabond Club, a group of teenage boys organized by Isaac Rab.) Creighton was too busy to attend, but he put together the core group of three or four selected from his friends and employees at Babson’s. They were instructed never to ask William about his personal life. The classes began around 1935, expanding to as many as eight members, and continued until shortly before William’s death nine years later. The group usually met evenings in the office of Shirley Smith, who ran a rental agency in Boston; and occasionally at the home of a Babson secretary, Margaret McGill. The members paid fifty cents per evening, which sometimes added up to as much as four dollars. Ac-cording to these ladies, the meetings were a combination of lecture and party. There were always refreshments—peanuts or cookies (once, when a full dinner was prepared, William ate nothing but baked potatoes the entire evening)—and William would begin by lecturing. The topic was generally American history, Sidis-style. He never read from notes, though he occasionally handed out portions of The Tribes and the States or The Peace Paths. Shirley Smith described a typical meeting: “We would mill around and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Sidis. How are you?’ It was a small, comfortable room. And we had all ensconced ourselves. And then he’d stand up, near a table decorated with the peanuts and candy. He had a terrific sweet tooth. “It was very characteristic of him to make his points by nodding. Although his voice was somewhat soporific, I don’t think we ever went to sleep—it was interesting. And it was not too long. And then, presently, he would come to the conclusion. Meantime, he had been dipping into the peanuts. He’d work closer and closer to the table and then reach out and grab them and stuff them into his mouth, and keep right on talking. Afterward, we had soft drinks and cake.” According to Margaret McGill, “We called him ‘Mr. Sidis,’ but once in a while we’d slip and call him ‘Bill,’ on an especially festive occasion. On the whole it was very informal, except when he was talking. And if it got too long, we’d hold out a bag of peanuts. He’d just automatically reach for it—and that’s how we’d get him to slow down or rest. But I don’t think he realized it, because he was so intent on what was going on in his head. He really was an extraordinary person. “He had a peculiar way of standing, as he would deliver a talk to us. He’d stand on one foot, and twist around, and bend. It sometimes got a little stuffy at the meeting and we wished that Bill would take more baths. It could get to be pretty bad. He had no use for conventions at all. If it was hot in the summer, he’d cut off his shirt sleeves —he went to his office jobs like that. “After the lecture, he sometimes tried to make us sing. I can’t carry a tune, so I sat down in the corner and laughed. He made up songs, too, even though he couldn’t sing either. And he made up guessing games, and some of them were good. He was almost like a small boy in his pleasure in getting us to do these things. We never did anything as absurd as wear funny hats or anything like that. But he grew on you. He was a curious mixture of a small child and a very superior person.” William dropped in on Shirley occasionally at her office, and she took him to lunch around the corner. She kept a careful eye on him as they crossed the street; he was so deeply engrossed in whatever he was discoursing on that he barely noticed the oncoming traffic. Though they were frequent lunch companions, Shirley never visited Bill at his home. Very few of his friends did, so careful was he about his privacy. One of the few visitors was young Bill Rab, who made two trips to the room on West Canton Street. “It was a typical rooming house, with the bathroom down the hall. There was a bed in the corner, a desk, and bookcases; and orange crates to supplement the bookcases. It was never brightly lit, and the two light bulbs were always bare. It was stark. The wallpaper gave you the feeling that it was the cover of an old, old manuscript—aged, and aged, and aged. He had a little shelf over his hot plate, on which he kept the staples. Underneath it he had a cabinet, in which he kept the packaged staples. There was a little anteroom—it couldn’t have been any bigger than four by six. It was probably just loaded with manuscripts. He had as many folders filled with manuscripts as he did books. He had a few Western scenes from magazines thumbtacked on the wall—by Remington—that’s all. The room wasn’t disheveled. It was just a bare minimum. “And he had two typewriters. A conventional Miracle typewriter, and a Lichtenstern. That was an interchangeable-face typewriter—like the IBM balls. It was a very compact thing—it folded down so you could put it in a silverware drawer. It looked flimsy, but he did all his work on it, at least all his foreign-language work. He could type in Russian, in German, and in Spanish. He was a great protagonist of Esperanto, which he taught me.” As a host, William was predictably negligent. He did not care for conventional greetings, was reluctant to say “Hello” or “Goodbye,” or to shake hands. He rarely gave gifts to anyone, with the exception of Helena, to whom he brought boxes of candy. He once stunned Julius Eichel by producing a box of candy and offering it. William, nearing the age of forty, was fully as eccentric as Samuel Johnson, but except for trouble keeping a job, and his attendant worries about money, he hummed along happily, always productive and usually contented. On August 15, 1937, William’s carefully built fortress of anonymity was attacked. A local newspaper, the Boston Sunday Advertiser, published an article about the former boy wonder —the first offensive article in more than a decade. And for the first time in his life, the former boy wonder did something other than retreat further into that fortress—he fought back. 17 Invasion of Privacy The article in the Boston Sunday Advertiser was titled “Sidis, Genius, Discovered Working as Boston Clerk” and subtitled, “Child Prodigy of 1914 Shuns Publicity.” Genius in a tawdry South End boarding house. Genius driven by some strange mental quirk to seek obscurity in dullness and mediocrity. That is the story of William J. Sidis, child prodigy and mathematical wizard, who yesterday was discovered working as a clerk in a Boston business house. William J. Sidis, now thirty-nine, was once declared by a group of eminent scientists to be a coming innovator in the field of science, with potentialities as great as Einstein and as brilliant as Marconi. Yet yesterday a Sunday Advertiser writer found him in a small room, wall-papered and dark, where for the past five years he has lived unknown, unsung, uncaring. HE LOATHES GENIUS Master of Latin and Greek when he was barely large enough to mount a bicycle, Sidis prefers that room to the more palatial quarters that might have been his, according to a source close to him. He hates to be a genius. He prefers to be a clerk. The writer yesterday stood in the street before Sidis’s home. On either side were identical rows of red brick turret-front houses. From them, as he watched came men and women on their way to work—shipping clerks, waitresses, laborers. Next door a Chinese laundryman nodded now and then to a passing acquaintance as he industriously ironed shirts. In the middle of the street a man fed bread crumbs to a flock of pigeons. Each day, five days a week, the man who was graduated from Harvard University in 1914 when he was barely sixteen years of age, comes out his door—like the laborers, like the others —and goes to work. He runs an adding machine. Publicity shy since his early youth, Sidis avoided questioning. While an embattled landlady stood grimly at the foot of a staircase, Sidis remained on the first floor landing. He made but one statement that could be recorded. Asked for an interview, he snapped in a high voice: “Decidedly not!” Then he shut his door and cajoling, arguing and flattering failed to move the Horatia at the staircase. HE LIVES IN SOUTH END LODGINGS KEEPS JOB SECRET The people with whom Sidis lives say he is a quiet, well behaved man. He has few friends “none of them very close to him, though,” and for relaxation he writes books about streetcar transfers. A large, heavy man, with a light moustache, Sidis is reticent to an extreme point. So afraid is he that his brilliant gifts will be uncovered that in the five years he has lived in the South End house he has never told the other people in it where he works. Opportunities galore offer themselves to him, but Sidis consistently turns them down, it was learned. Only recently, a friend took him to an office, where he applied for a clerk’s job. Recognizing him the prospective employer exclaimed: “Why you don’t want a job like that! You ought to be on the Boston planning board.” But Sidis doesn’t want the planning board type of work. He showed that clearly in 1918, when at the age of 20 he was a professor at a Texas college. He quit the position, returned to Boston and unobtrusively went to work as a clerk.… From time to time enterprising newspapers rediscovered him, but Sidis evolved a way of fooling them. He simply threw up whatever job he had and moved to another city. His shyness toward the press had been evidenced at the time he was nine, when he astounded scientific leaders of the day with a learned lecture on the fourth dimension. At that time he would turn and flee, old time reporters here recalled, whenever approached. And so today—unless he has moved since this was written —he lives in the tawdry South End room, with its flower-covered wallpaper, and writes treatises on floods and streetcar transfers. He lives a clerk, unsung, unknown, uncaring. Mobilized at last by over thirty years of wrath, William sued the Advertiser on four counts. Because few documents pertaining to the case are extant, we know only what the first count was: libel. As a result of the article’s publication, Sidis claimed, he “had been held up to ridicule, and had suffered great anguish of mind, and his reputation had been seriously injured, and he otherwise suffered great loss and damage.” This daring step—exposing William as it did to the possibility of further publicity—had barely been taken when a far larger bomb fell on his fortress. On August 15, 1937, The New Yorker magazine made William the subject of a lengthy article in its “Where Are They Now?” series. It was the most publicity to which William had been exposed since he was front-page news in The New York Times at age eleven, and this time the publicity was far from favorable. The article was titled “April Fool!” and was accompanied by a small cartoon of William in knickerbockers lecturing to the Harvard Mathematics Club. The author of the article was given as one Jared L. Manley, a regular New Yorker writer; but that name was actually a pseudonym for the famed humorist James Thurber, who was on the staff of the magazine. “April Fool!” began with the standard rundown of William’s childhood accomplishments, with an eye to the development of neuroses. The prodigy’s youthful fear of dogs was mentioned, and Manley / Thurber wrote, “Those who remember him in those years say that he had something of the intense manner of a neurotic adult.” The article contained a great many factual errors, including the claim that William had attended Tufts College, which was actually Norbert Wiener’s alma mater. The usual story of a nervous breakdown at Harvard and treatment at Boris’s sanatorium was copied, after which “[William] began to show a marked distrust of people, a fear of responsibility, and a general maladjustment to normal life.” To William’s famous graduation quote, “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is in seclusion. I have always hated crowds,” was added this commentary, “For ‘crowds’ it was not difficult to read ‘people.’ ” A brief account of the years preceding the May Day arrest followed, and a lengthy explication of the trial and William’s testimony. Much text was devoted to Notes on the Collection of Transfers, with several excerpts from the book. The New Yorker had traced one of William’s New York City landlords, Harry Friedman, and Friedman’s sister, a Mrs. Schlectien, who refused to pass on his current address, though they still forwarded mail to him. A few particulars of William’s life were extracted from these individuals: “ ‘He had a kind of chronic bitterness, like a lot of people you see living in furnished rooms,’ Mr. Friedman recently told a researcher into the curious history of William James Sidis. Sidis used to sit on an old sofa in Friedman’s living room and talk to him and his sister. Sidis told them that he hated Harvard and that anyone who sends his son to college is a fool—a boy can learn more in a public library.… Once the young man brought down from his room a manuscript he was working on and asked Mrs. Schlectien if he might read ‘a few chapters’ to her. She said it turned out to be a book on the order of ‘Buck Rogers,’ all about adventures in a future world of wonderful inventions. She said it was swell.” The conclusion of “April Fool!” read as follows: William James Sidis lives today, at the age of thirty-nine, in a hall bedroom of Boston’s shabby south end. For a picture of him and his activities, this record is indebted to a young woman who recently succeeded in interviewing him there. She found him in a small room papered with a design of huge, pinkish flowers, considerably discolored. There was a large, untidy bed and an enormous wardrobe trunk, standing half open. A map of the United States hung on one wall. On a table beside the door was a pack of streetcar transfers neatly held together with an elastic. On a dresser were two photographs, one (surprisingly enough) of Sidis as the boy genius, the other of a sweet-faced girl with shell-rimmed glasses and an elaborate marcel wave. There was also a desk with a tiny, ancient typewriter, a World Almanac, a dictionary, a few reference books, and a library book which the young man’s visitor at one point picked up. “Oh, gee,” said Sidis, “that’s just one of those crook stories.” He directed her attention to the little typewriter. “You can pick it up with one finger,” he said, and did so. William Sidis at thirty-nine is a large, heavy man, with a prominent jaw, a thickish neck, and a reddish moustache. His light hair falls down over his brow as it did the night he lectured to the professors in Cambridge. His eyes have an expression which varies from the ingenuous to the wary. When he is wary, he has a kind of incongruous dignity which breaks down suddenly into the gleeful abandon of a child on holiday. He seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh. He seems to get a great and ironic enjoyment out of leading a life of wandering irresponsibility after a childhood of scrupulous regimentation. His visitor found in him a certain childlike charm. Sidis is employed now, as usual, as a clerk at a business house. He said that he never stays in one office long because his employers or fellow-workers soon find out that he is the famous boy wonder, and he can’t tolerate a position after that. “The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill,” he said. “All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won’t let me alone.” It came out that one time he was offered a job with the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway Company. It seems that the officials fondly believed the young wizard would somehow be able to solve all their technical problems. When he showed up for work, he was presented with a pile of blueprints, charts, and papers filled with statistics. One of the officials found him an hour later weeping in the midst of it all. Sidis told the man he couldn’t bear responsibility, or intricate thought, or computation—except on an adding machine. He took his hat and went away. Sidis has a new interest which absorbs him at the moment more than streetcar transfers. This is the study of certain aspects of the American Indian. He teaches a class of half a dozen interested students once every two weeks. They meet in his bedroom and arrange themselves on the bed and floor to listen to the onetime prodigy’s intense but halting speech. Sidis is chiefly concerned with the Okommakamesit tribe, which he describes as having a kind of proletarian federation. He has written some booklets on Okommakamesit lore and history, and if properly urged, will recite Okommakamesit poetry and even sing Okommakamesit songs. He admitted that his study of the Okommakamesits is an outgrowth of his interest in socialism. When the May Day demonstration of 1919 was brought up by the young woman, he looked at the portrait of the girl on his dresser and said, “She was in it. She was one of the rebel forces.” He nodded his head vigorously, as if pleased with that phrase. “I was the flag-bearer,” he went on. “And do you know what the flag was? Just a piece of red silk.” He gave his curious laugh. “Red silk,” he repeated. He made no reference to the picture of himself in the days of his great fame, but his interviewer later learned that on one occasion, when a pupil of his asked him point-blank about his infant precocity and insisted on a demonstration of his mathematical prowess, Sidis was restrained with difficulty from throwing him out of the room. Sidis revealed to his interviewer that he has another work in progress: a treatise on floods. He showed her the first sentence: “California has acquired considerable renown on account of its alleged weather.” It seems that he was in California some ten years ago during his wanderings. His visitor was emboldened, at last, to bring up the prediction, made by Professor Comstock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 1910, that the little boy who lectured that year would grow up to be a great mathematician, a famous leader in the world of science. “It’s strange,” said William James Sidis, with a grin, “but, you know, I was born on April Fool’s Day.” William was horrified, enraged, and hurt. Some of his friends didn’t speak of the article, out of deference to his feelings. Others, such as Julius Eichel, offered condolences: “Esther and I read the article that has so upset you in The New Yorker, for it was widely advertised. I knew that it would make you feel miserable. I had no notion that the reporters would add to your troubles by hounding you.” When Norbert Wiener read the story, he was stunned. Of all people, he understood all too well the mortifications that a child prodigy endures. The New Yorker piece offended him enough to warrant two pages of discussion in his autobiography. He called the article “an act of the utmost cruelty,” pointing out that Sidis had “ceased to be news for nearly a quarter of a century … the question of the infant prodigy was not a live issue, even in the public press, and had not been for some time, until The New Yorker made it so.” He thought it offensive that the editors of the magazine rationalized and justified their story “by the claim that the actions of people in the public eye are the object of fair newspaper comment.” In Wiener’s opinion, Sidis in adult life “was a defeated—and honorably defeated —combatant in the battle for existence” who, as a result of the article, “was pilloried like a side-show freak for fools to gape at.” Wiener concluded: “I suspect certain members of The New Yorker staff of muddled thinking. In many literary circles, anti-intellectualism is the order of the day. There are sensitive souls who blame the evils of the times on modern science and who welcome the chance to castigate its sins. Furthermore, the very existence of an infant prodigy is taken as an affront by some. What, then, could constitute a better spiritual carminative than an article digging up the old Sidis affair, at the same time casting dishonor on the prodigy and showing up the iniquity of the scientist-prodigy-maker? The gentlemen who were responsible for this article overlooked the fact that W. J. Sidis was alive and could be hurt very deeply.” If the public mockery were not enough, William rankled under the added outrage of having been spied upon. He had certainly not granted an interview to anyone he might have suspected was a reporter. How, then, did The New Yorker secure its story? Speculations as to who “leaked” William’s tale abound. Shirley Smith and Margaret McGill are convinced that the mole was none other than John, a member of their study group. Cheery, sociable, and a close friend of Creighton Hill’s, John was above suspicion when he brought a female guest to one of the meetings. The members occasionally invited guests, as did William, and there seemed to be nothing strange in it when John brought along a good friend. According to Shirley Smith, she was the daughter of an editor at the Random House publishing company. She sat quietly during the meeting, and did not exchange a single word with Sidiss. She certainly did not interview him at that time. Shirley and Margaret became suspicious only when The New Yorker article came out, and John behaved guiltily. According to Shirley Smith, “We were ready to murder him after that. He admitted that he was afraid to come to any more meetings. As far as I know, he never met Sidis again.” It is not known whether Shirley and Margaret passed this information on to William; nor is it a certainty that John’s friend was the “interviewer” referred to in the story. Nor is it known whether a reporter actually saw the inside of William’s room. William always maintained that the entire article was a combination of imagination and old stories about him, and that no stranger had gained access to his room. In any case, no amount of sleuthing on the part of Sidis or his friends could change the fact of the article’s publication. Frustrated and angry, William had come to the end of his tether with reporters. Armed with a good deal of rage and years of legal training, he set about to sue The New Yorker, on two counts of invasion of privacy, and one count of malicious libel. He sued for $150,000. James Thurber, in his autobiography The Years with Ross, called the suit “far and away the most important legal case in the history of the magazine, and the only one that ever reached the United States Supreme Court.” Sidis commenced his suit in the New York Federal Court on July 7, 1938. He had turned forty thirteen weeks before, and the little joke he habitually made on his birthday—about April Fool’s Day—had been spoiled by the publication of the article. His friends never heard him make it again. William employed the firm of Greene & Russell, and according to his friends he prepared many of his own briefs. In his complaint, Sidis stated that as the result of the article’s publication he had been held up to “public scorn, ridicule and contempt, causing him grievous mental anguish, humiliation, and loss of reputation” and “for a long time to come will be severely damaged and handicapped in his employment as a clerk or in any other employment and in his social life and pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, “the plaintiff was besieged in his residence by reporters from the newspapers and the press of the country and was forced to remain in seclusion and was rendered unable to attend to the duties of his daily occupation.” This last must have been a terrible torture for William. It had been twenty-five years since reporters beat down his door en masse. But however strong his urge to pack up and leave, to run away from this onslaught, the courage of his convictions was stronger, and he stayed to fight the case. William objected to a series of specific points in his first complaint. Besides the falsities about his education and nervous breakdowns, he added one interesting objection: “That plaintiff is in the habit of withholding from his employers an alleged extraordinary mathematical ability which defendant’s said article states that plaintiff possesses, and thereby not rendering service to his employers to the best of his ability.” Of course, William was right in essence—he was a responsible employee, and always performed to the best of his ability. But in treading this ground, he must have been prepared to state, before a judge and a jury, that he possessed no mathematical prowess. The New Yorker’s attorneys, the renowned firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, responded that the facts of William’s life were matters of great public interest, importance, and concern. They had not damaged his reputation, because he “was not favorably known among people generally and did not have a good reputation, but on the contrary had the reputation for being peculiar and eccentric.” Besides, they argued, The New Yorker magazine had offered to print any letter William cared to write in his defense, but he had refused to avail himself of the offer. Judge Goddard in the lower court and Judge Clark of the Circuit Court were highly sympathetic to William; nonetheless Goddard rejected his suit for invasion of privacy. Clark stated his opinion: “It is not contended that any of the matter printed is untrue. Nor is the manner of the author unfriendly; Sidis today is described as having ‘a certain childlike charm.’ But the article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, and this in company with elaborate accounts of Sidis’s passion for privacy and the pitiable lengths to which he has gone to avoid public scrutiny. The work possessed great reader interest, for it is both amusing and instructive; but it may be fairly described as a ruthless exposure of a once public character, who has since sought and has now been deprived of the seclusion of a private life.” In spite of this sympathy, Judge Clark concluded, “Regrettably or not, the misfortunes and frailties of neighbors and ‘public figures’ are subjects of considerable interest and discussion to the rest of the population. And when such are the mores of the community, it would be unwise for a court to bar their expression in the newspapers, books, and magazines of the day.” William was not to be daunted. He changed attorneys, and was next represented by the firm of Sapinsky, Lukas & Santangelo, whom he employed to appeal the case; this time he asked to appeal as a “poor person.” After red tape which dragged on for several years, the appeal was denied, and William was charged court costs of $31.45. In 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court listened to arguments and refused to hear the case. “The article,” wrote James Thurber, “… was to become forever celebrated in legal and publishing circles everywhere because of the important precedent established by the courts, affecting all so-called ‘right-of-privacy’ cases.… A decision in favor of Sidis would, to summarize it briefly, result in continual and multitudinous cases of public figures suing the authors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, books and encyclopedias. The opinion of the judges could be condensed into eight words: ‘Once a public figure, always a public figure.’ … The great importance of the Sidis case lies in its having become the principal authority in all similar cases in which the right of privacy is claimed by a person who is, or once was, a notable public figure. It was to save The New Yorker from a similar suit.…” Thurber, writing over a decade after the courts’ decisions, expressed his disappointment that the judges had not grasped the article’s intention. “The general tenor of the article was called ‘amusing and instructive’ but nowhere was there any indication whatever of what I thought had stood out all through my story, implicit though it was —my sincere feeling that the piece would help to curb the great American thrusting of talented children into the glare of fame or notoriety, a procedure in so many cases disastrous to the later career and happiness of the exploited youngsters.” Thurber expressed no regret at having disturbed the career or happiness of a vulnerable, and very much alive, individual. Determined not to give up, William continued the suit—the libel charges remained standing—and he pressed on. In the meantime, William had experienced a small victory—perhaps one that gave him the courage to continue his battle against The New Yorker. In 1941, he won his suit against the Boston Sunday Advertiser, and received a settlement of $375. 18 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars William’s legal time-consuming activities didn’t make a dent in his productive output. He churned out newsletters, manuscripts, and correspondence with a greater vigor than ever before. With only his cumbersome hectograph equipment, he produced a volume of work in five years that surely would have taken another man twenty. Increasingly, the newsletters written when he was in his forties dealt with pacifism. Violent in his opposition to all war work, William despised the CO camps that were the fate of conscientious objectors during World War II if they wished to escape imprisonment. He regarded them as little more than concentration camps. As he told Helena, “Those who do war work while refusing to fight put the ‘fist’ in ‘pacifist.’ ” As the war progressed, William developed a passionate devotion to a work plan of his own devising for objectors, which he called Volunteer Urban Self-supporting Projects. The VUSP, he dreamed, could be a national, cooperative venture centering on any number of industries, with none of the profits going to support the war effort. In the interests of receiving government sanction for the project, he wrote reams of letters to politicians and laymen, sent out petitions, and poured out newsletters. The VUSP’s first project, he hoped, would be a series of urban transit guides. The Penacook Courier gave way to the Continuity News, begun in 1938 and published under one of William’s favorite pseudonyms, Parker Greene. It bore the mottoes “The Past Is the Key to the Present,” and “We Attempt to Explain Rather Than to Advocate.” In one of the first issues he used the word libertarian as a solution to the quest for “a new name for government with limited powers.” The content of the Continuity News was what we think of when we use the term libertarian today. Sidis railed against Roosevelt’s New Deal, “with its idea of making money appear bigger by shortening the measure.” He criticized the New Deal for introducing fiat or paper money into the economy and entitled the following commentary “Screwball Economics”: “The main point common to the various brands of screwball economics is the fanatical belief that, given proper juggling, there is no difficulty in making something out of nothing, and that the particular candidate for office could do it if elected.” The Continuity News was followed by The Orarch, beginning in December 1938. The Orarch’s motto was “Grant to Others All Rights You Would Have Others Grant to You.” Each issue bore the same disclaimer: “Issued by the Boston Liberty Group. This paper is issued by a group, and is not the property of any individual.” Its contents were similar to that of the Continuity News, with more emphasis on conscientious objection and the evils of racism. William published The Orarch for five years. During this period he formed a group that he dubbed the Liberty War Objectors Association (LWOA), “a CO organization based on individual rights as grounds of opposition to war,” and released an assortment of constitutions and articles under its auspices. Beginning in September 1943, William served as associate editor to Julius Eichel’s CO newsletter, The Absolutist. William wrote a weekly column again under the pen name Parker Greene, in which he plumped for his pet VUSP, attacked current government programs for objectors, and stressed the point that he opposed the draft on the grounds that it violated individual rights. This was a position few COs emphasized. Wrote William, “Where pacifist organizations have so far been merely opposed to war on the basis of humanitarian sentimentalities, the LWOA bases its objections solidly on the destruction of civil liberties involved in war.” And, “The VUSP plan is not a plan for ‘humanitarian’ work.… An absolutist cannot be a consistent ‘humanitarian’ oozing love toward all and sundry; for he must refuse to do war work even if it consists of ‘saving life’ instead of ‘taking life.’ William was opposed to the martyring of COs who went to prison. While a great many of his fellow COs supported these martyrs, he felt that a successful draft dodger had made a far better choice so long as he continued to seek a remedy (preferably the VUSP) to the situation that sent COs to prison. This stance made him unpopular with numerous fellow pacifists, who found a jail term and a hunger strike more romantic than a plan for alternative CO work. Eichel, as William’s editor, grew increasingly peeved, and their longtime correspondence grew ever more strained and pettish. Eichel wrote in November 1943: “There is a certain amount of tolerance we must exhibit even when we are absolutely sure the other fellow is wrong.… I admire your unbending devotion to principle, and often wish I could stand my ground as unflinchingly as you do in the face of great opposition, but our sheet will lose in influence if we make mountains out of the molehills of personalities.” William replied hotly, “Once and for all, it is a choice between me and censorship.… As I have said before, I do not think that everyone who can mumble I hate war’ should be immune from criticism. In many ways the interests of ‘pacifist’ politicians and those of absolutism are constantly clashing, and I don’t feel we should deliberately lie down to let those leaders rule our thoughts. To my mind, even FDR has a better claim to sincerity in his ‘I hate war’ than have some who claim to be pacifists.… If that be treason, make the most of it.” Matters worsened with each passing issue of The Absolutist, as Eichel edited portions of William’s columns, and William threatened to resign and start his own paper. Finally he announced that he had begun a “censorship strike.” Eichel maintained his temper beneath the barrage of letters, and finally agreed to print William’s column in its entirety with a disclaimer. This suited William admirably, and in his next letter to Eichel, he wrote, “I might have something on Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan martyr who suffered for the right to knock respected leaders. She was my inspiration in the ‘censorship strike’; I have often looked at the old site of her house; and she has rated about three pages of The Peace Paths. Expect me Christmas weekend.” The truce did not last long. A month later Eichel wrote to William, “It was a mistake in the first place to agree to an associate editor so far away. Perhaps we could have gotten along better if you were closer. Now it is out of the question. You can write for The Absolutist if you wish but there will be no guarantee that it will be mimeographed.” Hostilities heightened, and in the January 18, 1944, issue, Eichel took a low blow at Sidis. He announced that the paper was dropping the promotion of VUSP, and wrote, “For further information … readers will be referred to William James Sidis.” Eichel knew very well what it meant to William to keep his real name a secret, and especially never to allow it to appear in print; this was certainly a hostile act, intended to wound. In February 1944, William finally managed to put out his own four-page CO newsletter, as he had threatened to do for so long. Titled The Libertarian, it was devoted solely to his favorite CO topics, and to taking a number of digs at Eichel and his policies. It was edited by “Parker Greene,” and bore the motto, “That Government Is Best Which Governs Least—Thomas Jefferson.” William sent a copy to Eichel. In the accompanying letter, William noted that “the VUSP plan is changing, and it is withdrawing from political controversy. “I have always hated politics in general, and am coming to the conclusion that pacifist politics is as poisonous as any other variety of politics.… I hope you are satisfied [with the direction we are now taking]—but it makes little difference whether you are or not. Use your own discretion as to whether to continue me on your mailing list or not. My own suggestion is, don’t do it. I am not especially interested in the welfare of prisoners—there are so many other angles that I find more important.” In April 1944, the vituperous correspondence reached a climax. In William’s final letter to Eichel, one that ended a friendship of twenty years, he wrote, “In case you do not know it, the dodo was a bird which, when faced with men armed with clubs, walked up and openly challenged the hunter. Result—there are now no dodos. To my mind, such is the attitude of most of those whom you are holding up as heroes. I could feel more admiration for someone who frankly did a good job of dodging. And it makes no difference if you take that as personal antagonism—I would still feel the same if I had never met you.” Eichel retorted, “I have received your letter referring to dodos, and I feel it is about time I spoke out frankly on your social attitude towards others. Everyone seems to be aware of your lack of consideration, and I take it for granted you are aware of the same fault.… If human beings must be compared to birds, besides dodos there are ostriches who think that by sticking their heads in the sand they are completely hidden from view.” Sidis and Eichel ended their friendship on this bitter note. As for The Libertarian, its primary function had been as an organ enabling a crabby William James Sidis to bluster at Julius Eichel. In issue number 2, Parker Greene announced that “the VUSP is withdrawing from all political controversy,” and “The Libertarian is taking this opportunity of saying goodbye to its readers.… A refund is being sent to all paid subscribers.” William seemed to be going off the deep end when it came to his CO politics. The contrast between his first essays on conscientious objection and plans for alternatives to the work camp system, and the ones he penned for The Absolutist, is striking. The strain of his ongoing lawsuit, and his constant financial duress might have accounted for this difference. Another factor probably played a considerable role in this change—William’s deteriorating health. Although he refused to be bothered about it, he had very high blood pressure. Even if he had been willing to go to a doctor, he lived in an era that had no effective medications for his condition. Though William pursued his CO activities with his usual burning intensity, spending countless hours hectographing newsletters, engaging in correspondences, and arranging his secret meetings and initiations, it was not the only—nor even the central—activity in his life. For almost two years—from January 3, 1941, to September 18, 1942, William wrote a weekly page in a Boston magazine, What’s New in Town. The column was titled “Meet Boston,” and ran under yet another pseudonym, Jacob Marmor. It is not known what salary he was paid—probably very little since he continued to complain of financial difficulties. The magazine did volunteer to advertise his perpetual calendars, the sale of which brought in a steady trickle of income. Of all William’s writings—from those about higher mathematics to streetcar transfers to American histories to French poetry to pacifist propaganda—”Meet Boston” is the most readable, the most accessible, the most professional. It is a cheerfully patriotic and varied collection of trivia about the city William Sidis loved. The column’s first appearance was topped by a headline in the Robert Ripley tradition: “Strange but True.” William saw and reported with the eyes of a true Boston-lover. He fueled the ever raging New York—versus—Boston debate, writing of the “insular Manhattanite,” and he peppered his columns with items such as the following: “According to the census of 1930, there were about 2,700 cows resident in New York City. And only 90 in Boston. Which would seem to prove that Boston is nowhere near as much a cow-town as New York. Or does it mean that the larger population of New York consists mainly of cows?” William’s choice of trivia was often fascinating. He told the story of Benjamin Franklin’s leaving one hundred dollars in his will to his native town of Boston, to be put out at 6 percent compound interest for a century, then used for a work of public benefit. At the end of that period—in 1890—the one hundred dollars had grown to forty thousand dollars. The money was used to build Franklin Park, which is the same size as New York’s Central Park. William had collected a great deal of material about his hometown of Brookline. “In colonial times it was reputed to be the hangout of idlers who, so ran the belief of the more ‘respectable’ townspeople in ‘the Village,’ never did any work, but spent their time ‘puttering about.’ And so this region is still called Putterham.” Naturally, William slipped many of his pet interests into the column. He plugged his transit guides. He announced that “the small and obscure habit of peridromophily” had been organizing, and its national headquarters were now in Boston where it issued the hobby’s only organ, The New Peridromophile. William went so far as to quote a work by the ubiquitous Parker Greene titled American Descriptions, an unpublished book “giving some interesting descriptions of incidents in America.” One such incident occurred when William (alias Parker Greene) saw a refraction mirage from the window of his Cambridge office building. In fact, he had been extraordinarily fortunate in seeing more than one. The first experience had proved so exciting that he watched the sky daily from his office window, hoping for the precise concurrence of light and timing that would bring the seemingly magical image into view again. William knew everything about the proper conditions for the appearance of such a spectacle. As Helena explained, “Of course, it’s very rare, and you have to be very observant and know a great deal about meteorology. Billy knew plenty about meteorology, inside and out. He knew the time when the winds and clouds and everything else would be just favorable. He explained it to me in detail. But I was so mad when one of those reporters wrote up the thing. He said that my brother was some kind of an oddball, who used to spend most of his lunchtime looking up at the sky. The other people in the office didn’t understand it, either. He was always looking up.” The following week, Jacob Marmor ran a correction of a minor error that had appeared in the preceding article, and offered “Our apologies to the author of ‘American Descriptions.’ ” William’s idea of a really good joke, it seemed, was to apologize pseudonymously to himself, using yet another of his pseudonyms! While William battled The New Yorker, which fought to prove him a pathetic, useless wreck of a man leading a burnt-out life, he was producing professional, well-received pieces of journalism. In “Meet Boston” William decided to tickle his anonymity funny bone. The following excerpt is William’s only, not-too-veiled, reference to his Harvard days, and those of fellow prodigy Norbert Wiener: Over thirty years ago, Tufts College turned out the youngest college graduate on record—age fourteen. He would appear to have been the only extra-young college graduate in America who specialized in mathematics; for, though another boy shortly afterwards was reputed to be a mathematician, there was nothing authentic about such reports, which were 100% pipe-dream. The Tufts graduate now teaches mathematics; the victim of the press hoax is unable to even understand the subject. Case of mistaken identity. At no time during his busy life did William neglect his hobby. He continued to publish transfer-collecting newsletters, to correspond with other enthusiasts, and to run a “transfer deposit bank” called the “Transfer-X-Change,” whereby collectors could make deposits and withdrawals through the mail. For fifty cents a new collector could purchase a sample pack of fifty transfers from the bank. William’s own collection consisted of well over 2,000 items. Some correspondents claimed collections as large as 50,000 transfers strong, representing over nine hundred cities. However, all was not bliss in the world of transferania. Far from it. An undercurrent of tempestuous unrest seethed among America’s transfer collectors, all of whom were easily as dedicated as Sidis, if their correspondence and publications are any indication. Rival publications and organizations sprang up like mushrooms, hurling accusations and invective at one another. At times, the atmosphere of frenzy reached such proportions that it is a wonder William had time for the other pressing affairs of his life: his New Yorker lawsuit, his weekly “Meet Boston” column, his American history classes, his pacifist newsletters, and his books. The depth of feeling shown by some of the correspondents is not unlike that which emerged in the Eichel-Sidis exchange. The letters to William, and editorials in the major rival newsletter, The Transfer Collector, give the flavor of life in the transfer trenches. The editor of the Transfer Collector—or TC as it was popularly known—was an impassioned character named Charles S. Jones who operated out of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and appeared to rule his neck of the woods with an iron transfer. He editorialized loudly and passionately, writing that “TC tolerates no slackers…. If you are not in a position to give time and effort to your collection, we suggest that you seek some other less diversified avocation. Peridromophily is not a lazy man’s hobby.” (The word that William had coined in 1926, as Frank Folupa, had been appropriated by all like-minded hobbyists.) Relations between The New Peridromophile and the Transfer Collector had begun amicably enough. Jones respectfully referred to Sidis as “one of the ‘patriarchs’ of transfer collecting.” The publications shared subscription lists as early as 1930. William even wrote the occasional article for the rival organ, using his own name and referring to “the Folupa book on transfers.” In 1932, the Transfer Collector interviewed William on the subject of a slump in the hobby, and printed his response, again under his real name: “I think we should go after new recruits, and get them organized somehow to keep them from back-sliding too quick, then we could slowly work some of the old hands back into the game.” In 1933, the papers “merged.” William had just moved to Boston, and decided to stop publishing The Peridromophile. He sent his complete set of back files to the TC, and generously donated a hectograph kit to Jones. However, the passage of time saw increasing tensions among collectors. William had launched his New Peridromophile and there was bad blood between the two publications. In 1939, Jones turned the full force of his wrath on William in the April edition of the Transfer Collector: TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT On page 1 we stated that only one dissenting vote had been sent in on the question of a national organization. That vote was sent in by a person who has been opposed to almost every constructive plan that the TC has proposed in the past two years. We refer to one Parker Greene, who, with his magazine, has attempted to overthrow everything that we of the TC and the [Peridromophile Society] have worked so long and hard to accomplish. This gentleman comes forward with the mistaken idea that we are attempting to establish some sort of an autocracy, with your editor and Mr. Reinohl as co-dictators. If Mr. Greene had taken the trouble to read the constitution more carefully, he would have seen that there was no basis for any of his foolish accusations. The entire matter sums up to the fact that we are not organizing in a way suitable to Mr. Greene—a way which failed miserably under his leadership some months previously-and that there are no immediate plans for city transfer groups. However, this gentleman has no one to blame but himself, if our plan does not meet with his approval. An offer of cooperation, tendered Mr. Greene by our Mr. Reinohl last November, met with not even a courteous reply. Can the blame for this be laid at our door? As for Mr. Greene’s plan to hold a counter-meeting of those opposed to our society at the World’s Fair, we are afraid he will have to be twins—if he wants any company! The following week’s editorial again pointed to Sidis / Greene, as an “instigator of riot.” Jones cautioned that Greene and his ilk should “either cease their action or come into the open with their fancied grievances, or they will find themselves definitely out in the cold.” While Jones was obviously something of a madman, it cannot be denied that William had willingly entered the fray, and it is curious to consider that he did so with nearly the same intensity he dedicated to dangerous and important issues, such as conscientious objection. In fact, he had no option in the matter—his mind raced at an astounding speed that could not be turned down or off, regardless of the issue involved. Perhaps, in fact, memorizing lists of thousands of bus and streetcar routes throughout the country with every variation and alteration, in all their overwhelming detail, was for William a kind of quiet, low-key occupation, a lulling pleasure to be enjoyed much as the average man would muse over a baseball score, try to piece together the words of a popular song, or drift into reverie about his plans for Saturday night. One transfer buff in William’s circle guessed that there were about two hundred serious collectors in the United States. William received letters from several teenagers (“I am a very serious railroad fan of fifteen, with no ‘kid stuff’ about my hobby,” wrote one from Brooklyn), but only a few were from women. One collector wrote to William, “I believe Mr. Dunlop of Cicero has left the hobby. He told one collector ‘that he wanted to devote all his time to his wife’ —of all things!” For some collectors, such as this one from Cincinnati, the hobby occasionally resembled a drinking problem: “One doesn’t take to collecting transfers overnight—it grows on you. I can’t recall offhand just how I started. It was about five years ago. With each year it accelerated until the present, and I’m up to my neck now.” Although William used his actual name in some of his transfer activities, he also used several of his pseudonyms, and he never let his subscribers know just who was running the papers. One collector broke the ice and wrote to Mr. Greene, “Are Frank Folupa, Parker Greene, Mr. Sidis and Transfer-X-Change one and the same person?” Another, from St. Louis, discovered the truth: “I am writing this letter as a congratulation. I didn’t learn until a week ago that it was you whom the transfer collectors of the world have to thank for that brilliant work Notes on the Collection of Transfers. You have missed your due all these seventeen years by not revealing that you wrote that splendid book.” He had discovered William’s true identity by chatting with friends who worked at the transit company offices. A company official mentioned Folupa Sidis as “the founder of the hobby.” The collector concluded glowingly, “I think much credit belongs to you for your long struggle to establish and organize the hobby.” Most collectors did not share this relaxed attitude toward William’s aliases. In 1941, William wrote a long Code of Ethics for Transfer Collectors, in which he addressed this topic: “A transfer collector is entitled to use a pseudonym for the purpose of making contacts with other collectors; and other collectors are bound to respect his right of privacy in this regard. A collector may adopt a new pseudonym as often as he finds reason to believe that the privacy of his pseudonym is being threatened; and collectors are bound not to discriminate in any way against collectors using or changing a pseudonym in the hobby.” The Code of Ethics was controversial, and William circulated it widely among his fellow collectors. It consisted of twenty-six points, several of which were strict and dictatorial. “Peridromophily,” he wrote, “must not be made to extend to anything but the collection of local transit transfers.… Collectors who have other hobbies besides peridromophily should be careful to keep the collection of transfers separate from all other hobbies, and not to classify them together for any purpose.” William went into detail explaining what was and was not admissible as part of the hobby—overlap fare receipts were, tickets were not. Derelict transfers were admissible and should never be overlooked just because they had been thrown away. William stressed that violators of the Code of Ethics would be punished, if judged guilty by the Peridromophile Federation, although he did not say what form this punishment would take. Moreover, recipients of the code who belonged to the federation were “bound by this code upon its issuance.” Nonmembers who read the code, then corresponded with members, “shall be considered as having accepted this code and consented to being judged in accordance therewith for any offenses against transfer collectors’ ethics.” The code caused quite a stir, and William received a variety of letters in response, many written by incensed collectors. The St. Louis collector did not find “the whole Code of Ethics to be wrong. The exchange of transfers need be governed by certain moral considerations.… But the idea of any group or individual be he yourself, PS, NP, Jones etc. dictating what should be collected or how it should be displayed etc. is foreign to me. I believe in individual taste governing.” One collector wrote, “Baseball fans are not told how to root or when to root—I’ll do it my way, you do it yours.” The most strident voice wrote, “I see you, as all dictators do (like Hitler does) passed your Code of Ethics even though some of us voted against parts of the code you didn’t alter it any, that will not do, The PF is, I believe to follow the lines set by democracy governments.… Now why does the PF cloak themselves in darkness? Just who heads the PF is a mystery—I associate this with fraud—are they afraid of their lives if they make themselves known? Yes, I demand an answer. And another thing—why the Jawbreaker of a name permidromophile—my thought is whoever thought up a name as that should be committed to an insane institution. Awaiting your answer to redeem yourself and do see what you can do to revive the art of collecting transfers.” Charles Jones also objected to William’s anonymous Peridromo =phile Federation, writing, “It is a rather soul-less occupation, writing to an organization rather than to another individual.” But his true resentment toward Sidis lay in another area, one he finally revealed after years of hinting. “I feel personally that collectors should be permitted to correspond with other collectors as individuals rather than through the auspices of a central group. Such collectivism borders on the verge of Communism—a political science with which at least one of your members is familiar.” The postscript to the letter read: “The member of your group whom I charge with Communistic tendencies is, of course, your leader, William Sidis. I refer to a 1937 issue of The New Yorker which contained a short biography of this person.” One of William’s most poisonous correspondents also hailed from St. Louis. A typical missive from his pen read, “Dear Mr. Greene: I received the package of wastepaper, dignified by the name of transfers. When I say wastepaper, I mean just that, nothing but common stuff, such as New York City and Boston. All Boston transfers I ever saw looked like they were picked up out of the gutter. Boston has some of the lousiest transfers of any city. I don’t recall what I sent you, but it couldn’t have been as bad as what I got back; if that’s the way your transfer exchange works, you can have it.” The collector had his own transfer club in St. Louis, but he wrote William, “By the way, the second notice of dues I sent you was just a formality, and is of course to be ignored by you, since we don’t expect you to join. Speaking for myself, I don’t give a damn if you ever join again,” and then, in a fit of pique, dealt William the lowest blow one streetcar transfer collector ever dealt another: “No doubt you are a bus lover, tsk, tsk! What a pity, oh well!” Indeed, the vicissitudes of the hobby seemed worse, at times, than those of an antiwar struggle or a lawsuit against The New Yorker, but William bravely fought his battles on all fronts. There was only one battle that William would not fight face to face, one battle from which he still thought it wisest to withdraw in silence: the battle against Sarah Sidis. 19 “America’s Greatest Brain” In the years following Boris’s death, Sarah and Helena continued to run Portsmouth as a summer tourist resort. The clientele consisted of people driving by on the road and word-of-mouth recommendations. It was a grueling life for Helena, who was pressed into heavy service by her mother (much as Sarah herself had been as a girl). From eight in the morning until eleven o’clock at night she made beds, swept floors, and waited on guests. For a few years there was a maid, but eventually the maid left and Helena did everything. Her health was still delicate, she was still studying hard, and she was taking her first jobs as a social worker and a teacher. In 1933, Sarah bought property in Miami Beach and began to build apartment houses. She had recently played the stock market with considerable success, and while the Sidises’ standard of living was hardly luxurious, Sarah was able to make several trips to Europe. Her business acumen was excellent, and by 1936 she was doing extremely well in the market and expanding her Florida investments. Each winter, Sarah and Helena migrated to Miami Beach, returning in the summer to run the resort. Though Helena didn’t have to please tourists in Florida, she nonetheless found her life harder than in Portsmouth, “where we had a big house. If my mother started yelling, why, I’d just go into one of the other rooms.” Helena’s jobs periodically separated her from Sarah. At various times in the 1930s she worked in Connecticut, New York, and the Boston area, often in close proximity to her brother. When necessary, he traveled considerable distances to visit her, his only concern being the fear of running into his mother. In the ’40s, Helena spent several summers in a Brookline lodging house only a few blocks away from William. When Sarah visited Helena, William refused to stop by and risk a run-in until Helena arranged for their mother to be gone in the evenings. Then William came over every night, while Sarah stayed away—months passed like this, and mother and son never met. Despite the humiliation this must have been for Sarah, she never admitted to it in her autobiography. When Helena and William were separated, they corresponded voluminously, William sending batches of jokes and funny clippings with every letter. All but two letters are lost. One was written to Helena in Miami in 1936. She had requested information about the constellations to be seen in the Florida night sky. According to friends’ reports, William had a complete star map in his mind’s eye, and could describe the conformation of the stars at any given place in the world at any given time. He modestly began his letter, “I hardly think I could give you a good star description now—it is so many years since I followed that up.” He then proceeded to give an impeccable description of what to look for and when to do it, and illustrated this with a drawing of several constellations. He displayed a similar modesty in the second letter, which began, “Sorry to hear you are down with the chicken-pox. However, you need not worry about your letters infecting me—I had it in 1923; and did Martha [Foley] laugh when I phoned her and told her about it! As to your Portuguese dishes, I don’t know why you consider me an expert on anything Portuguese, but I’ll try.” William then proceeded to give a precise and clear explanation of Portuguese pronunciation, with a list of examples—obviously, Portuguese was on the tip of his tongue, just as any language was. It was in the first letter, the one with the star map, that William made the only surviving written reference to his mother. After a longish discussion of the weather in New England (one of his favorite topics) William wrote, “Had an awful nightmare about Miami a couple of weeks ago—but maybe that is best left undescribed. You probably know what is down there that I am so scared of.” While William admitted his fear to his sister, he usually showed his anger to his friends. George Gloss remembered: “He expressed over and over again a hatred for his mother. He said she was ‘horrible.’ He also spoke very bitterly of the time his parents tried to rehabilitate him in their sanatorium.” According to Ann Feinzig, “There were occasions when people would say, ‘Perhaps you should see your mother,’ or ‘Perhaps you should become reconciled.’ And he really got infuriated. A good fury, too. He was a gentle person, but certain things would rouse him, and if you mentioned anything about reconciling with his mother! He used the word ‘hate.’ ‘I hate my mother and I don’t want to talk to her! I don’t want to talk about her! He would really become very, very tense and very, very angry if you mentioned her. I never heard him mention his father.” What fell to Helena, then, was the terrible task of trying to satisfy her mother, who wanted not only a reconciliation with William but to renew her domination over his life. She constantly relayed messages through Helena: “She’d say, ‘Make him do this and tell him to do that … ,’ but I couldn’t make him do anything. And Billy would say to me, ‘She’ll never change.’ She was expecting me to be able to iron out the situation between them, which I couldn’t. All her life she wanted to make up, but there wasn’t any point in her trying. Billy would never accept. “It was hard to talk about this with my brother; in fact, we didn’t. I wanted him to get over this feeling about my mother. I wanted them to get together, because it was very hard for me to be a buffer between them. My mother never stopped talking about Billy, hoping I could have some influence on him—but nobody could have any influence on him. “She criticized me all the time, found fault in everything I did. You could never do anything right with my mother, she was a perfectionist. I always thought she was still taking it out on me that my father and my brother and I had left her out, because she didn’t fit in.” Besides the problems over William, Sarah remained quite a handful for Helena. “She always demanded a lot of company, and I wasn’t enough for her. I was teaching summer school and I couldn’t give her all my time. I called up some of my ex-students, and asked them to mother-sit.” By all accounts, Sarah worsened as she got older, becoming increasingly demanding, impatient, and abrasive. According to Helena, her mother was still considered a very beautiful woman; she told her daughter she had received many, many proposals after Boris’s death, but never considered remarriage. There were rumors that she’d had an affair with Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the inventor of Technicolor and an old family friend and patient, or, implausibly, with Howard Hughes, whom she met in Miami Beach—but if she did, it did nothing to soften her personality. When she reached the age of seventy, her relatives began to notice a slight mental deterioration. She was slowly developing senile dementia, which took the form of obsession about certain subjects, and incessant rambling. She stopped reading and stayed up all night playing solitaire. Earlier, in 1936 when she was sixty-two, she decided to write a book about William’s childhood and her views on child rearing. She wanted a collaborator, and Helena sent one of her brightest students, who found Sarah maddeningly obstinate and impossible to work with. The very idea was pathetic—mother and son were completely estranged, yet she continued to revel in the glory of his childhood, and to write the same early chapters over and over and over. When the book reached the point where William left the family, she returned to the beginning and began again, rather than face the hard fact of her failure to earn her son’s love and respect. William introduced most of his best friends to Helena, who in turn invited several of them to visit Portsmouth. Marcos Spinelli boycotted any contact with Sarah Sidis out of loyalty to William, but his wife, Grace, met her once. She said, “I could see why Sidis would have disliked her. Helena was very gracious, but Sarah was a very, very aggressive woman. I remember that she was short and chubby and she still spoke with an accent. A very dominating woman. I remember she had definite ideas about food—she had to have cottage cheese. She spoke with very positive, nonargumentative attitudes. You just couldn’t argue with her. And this is where I got the feeling that, although people say it was the father’s idea that you could develop a child genius, I thought it was hers.” Ann Feinzig, too, met Sarah once. She recalled, “I was perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two, very pensive, and I wanted to say things Bill would have said. And I did say something to Sarah that I probably shouldn’t have. She replied that people were very unkind about the way Bill was raised, that he was born exceptional, and that there was no way he could have had a normal childhood. She was defending herself and her husband. She told me at length about how Bill taught himself Greek as a gift to his father. And she talked about how reporters grabbed him and while one held him down, the other took his picture.” This diversion from the Boris-and-Sarah party line, that they made a genius out of an average boy, was most unusual. Sarah never admitted to anyone else that she thought her son was “born exceptional,” and perhaps she switched attitudes as a defensive posture, or revealed to Ann a change of outlook that was not part of her public image as a genius-creator. And while she defended herself by citing the stories of cruel reporters, she didn’t tell Ann how she had regularly dragged her son to teas and dinner parties against his will, to show him off to her friends. Sarah’s complaints about William were so numerous that Helena found it difficult to describe a single example. “It would be easier to say what she didn’t complain about,” said Helena. However, one persistent area of aggravation was money. With a mind like his, why did her son worry about finances, and whether or not he would keep his latest clerking position? Even the ever loyal Helena was angered by her brother’s refusal to accept high-paying work, particularly during the Depression. “For one thing,” said Helena, “I felt that if he would only get a job that was more what people would expect of him, reporters would leave him alone. And his colleagues at his office jobs didn’t like him because he did the work so fast. For some reason, he just wouldn’t conform and do it slowly. He was offered plenty of jobs. He never told me about them, but I would find out from other people. “I got really mad at my brother one time. I was very disgusted with him. He was offered twelve thousand dollars, which was an awful lot of money at that time. The Boston Subway System heard all about what he was doing with the transfers and everything else, and they wanted him to straighten out some of their problems. He refused, and I didn’t find out till later—he didn’t dare tell me. And my mother wanted me to give him some money! She said, ‘You must give him something.’ I was very upset and angry. I was living… not very well …in a furnished room. And I wasn’t being offered any million-dollar jobs. I was willing to go here, there, and everywhere for a job; it was the Depression and I accepted anything. But he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to go to Boston, he wanted to be in certain places. Well … then my mother got mad at me and I got mad at her.… And the upshot of it was that I gave him some of my own money. I tried to have him do a little something for me in exchange—he typed some of my poems. But it made me so mad that he wouldn’t work when he could. On the other hand, I didn’t know that he was ill. His blood pressure was very high, and he never told me.” There was a similar incident that particularly upset Helena. Barney Sagall, one of Sarah’s nephews and Elliot Sagall’s father, was a dentist practicing in Revere, Massachusetts. In 1942, he wanted a problem solved that involved occlusion of the teeth, which he recognized as a mathematical problem, and not a dental one. Though he had access to the forest minds at MIT and Harvard, he was convinced that only William could figure it out. As Barney told it, “I once offered to subsidize William if he would do some research for me in the medical dental field. But no go. He wouldn’t. I offered him a wicked salary. And he wouldn’t do it.” Helena elaborated: “At that time William was earning very little money. This problem that my cousin needed solved involved the striking surfaces of the upper and lower teeth. Barney told me, ‘Only William can do it, only William. I offered him three thousand dollars. I think he could have done it in half an hour, two hours maximum. It was worth three thousand to me.’ That’s worth at least forty-five thousand dollars today, for only a couple hours’ work. “And I got a little mad at him. After all, he said he needed a job. I said, ‘It’s only half an hour, Billy, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you?’ He said, ‘No. I don’t want to do it. The numbers would just make me sick.’ The story is almost paradoxical. He would talk to Helena about mathematics, or help Bill Rab with his math homework; but he could not take a job of complex figuring without risking emotional and physical illness. The amount of money his cousin offered would have funded all his newsletters, co-ops, groups, and meetings—but it wasn’t worth the mental suffering he would have had to endure. There is no doubt that he was perfectly capable of the calculations involved. The New York Sunday News printed the following story when William died, and it proves that his mathematical mind was no less sharp as an adult than it had been as a boy of eleven: Once a friend of his laid a copy of Einstein’s final formula for relativity on the table near Sidis while they were dining in a chop suey house. When he saw the Einstein formula he drew back slightly without a word as if he were puzzled. He was reading the figures upside down from three or four feet away. Then out of a clear sky he said without emphasis: “That’s a seven.” What he meant was that the friend had copied one little figure wrong in Einstein’s formula. He had set down a quantity to the sixth power when it should have been to the seventh power. The power was indicated by a small number written above and to the right of a letter on the lengthy equation. But if the friend thought Sidis would enlighten him on the theory of relativity he was mistaken. Sidis’s mind had long since refused to contemplate anything deeper than the problem of who stabbed the Count in the latest detective novels to which his last years were devoted. The reporter for the Sunday News understood little of Sidis’s motive for stopping—it was not, of course, inability, but aversion of a painful, neurotic origin. Naturally, what conversation William did have about mathematics with his sister or the young Rabs was limited by their knowledge. The only person for whom Sidis made an exception, discussing high-level math almost freely, was Nathan Sharfman, a friend he made during the 1930s through the Rabs. Perhaps this was because Sharfman and Sidis had something very uncommon in common. Like Sidis, Sharfman was an exceptional intellect who rejected academia and worked as a cab driver in Boston. He was a protégé of the famed philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who taught at Harvard between 1924 and 1936. Whitehead guided his student’s brilliant career at Harvard, where Sharfman had a teaching fellowship and was studying for his doctorate; Whitehead proclaimed him to be the hope of American philosophy. Sharfman married a beautiful young girl and had a child, and it seemed he had a magnificent life and career ahead. However, he took to drink, lost the wife, and made an outrageous drunken scene at a dinner party at the Whiteheads’ home, throwing his steak on the floor and insulting everybody. One of his best friends, British writer Dr. Paul Saunders, reminisced: “He broke all contact with Harvard. They gave him up, and he ended up driving a taxi. I can see him now, in front of the Copley Plaza Hotel, sitting there in his cab, slumped over the wheel with his hideous little black pipe in his mouth, and I thought, ‘Oh, my god! That’s the chap that Whitehead thought was the hope of American philosophy!’ When he met Sidis he was breaking up with his wife, and with Whitehead. “I remember the first time Sharfman brought Sidis round. I went to the door, and he pushed Sidis in ahead of him, saying, ‘This guy’s the best goddamn brain in the United States.’ That was his introduction. Sidis sort of leaned back and said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Nat,’ or something like that, something very lame. And Sharfman gave him another push, and he came into the room and sat down. For some reason I thought, It’s not going to do any good to flatter this chap, or make a normal reply to the most brilliant brain in the United States! So I said, ‘Sit down, will you have a cup of tea?’ He thoroughly enjoyed a cup of black tea. When I offered him wine, he turned it down rather contemptuously. “Then we had a general conversation. Something made me hesitate to plumb the depths of this brilliant mind, as it were. Inevitably, we got to talking about Boston. I lived in the west end; like all bohemians in those days, in the slums. But it was a nice apartment, and I had a very large library, three or four thousand books. These interested Sidis, of course, and he rather hesitantly asked me what most of them were. I said, ‘I’m in English Lit., but I’m stuck at a horrible war job now.’ So we got to talking. He was very cautious, putting in a word now and then, when all of a sudden—this is the first meeting —he began to expatiate on the significance of Boston, as far as Indian origins in the United States went, about what he’d assumed from geological phenomena, and the area that had been cleared in Back Bay, and what was discovered when layers of clay were removed, and so on. I don’t know where he got this information. He must have talked for well over an hour, without interruption. Then Sharfman said rather brusquely, ‘Well, what proof have you got?’ and Sidis shut up like a clam. He said, ‘I’m just a simple person. I don’t make any claims. These are just my surmises. I hope you won’t take this too seriously.’ From there he went on and spoke about girls—not erotically, but as though he was trying to change the subject. “Sidis and Sharfman were very fond of each other, but Sharfman’s relationship with Sidis was quite unusual. He spoke to Sidis in a brusque manner that I felt would normally offend him. Sometimes Sharfman would rib Sidis. He’d say, ‘Alright, how’s the genius working today?’ and things like that. It would upset Sidis terribly. Or Sharfman would start on some paean about Sidis, and Sidis would say ‘No, no, no, no—that is not so!’ Sidis didn’t want to be treated as an exhibit; he resented being called ‘America’s greatest brain.’ He’d reply with words to the effect of ‘I’m not a prize guinea pig, you know.’ Actually, it’s amazing that he tolerated Sharfman, he seemed to have a certain awe of him, as a lot of people did.” In no other relationship did he tolerate that kind of teasing. Apparently, William was willing to put up with a lot for some actual intellectual camaraderie. Paul Saunders was witness to some high-spirited conversations between the two ex-Harvard men. As he explained, “Sharfman was a brilliant man, and when he was not in liquor he was a reasonable debater. Once he tried to bring up the matter of the high points of music, and Sidis wasn’t receptive. But they discussed mathematical phenomena and philosophy a great deal. They argued about it a lot but the trouble was, it was a noncombat. Sidis would always back down and let Sharfman have the floor. It wasn’t a back-down in ideas, ever—it was a backdown in the sense of ‘Well, I’m not going to argue about it.’ Sidis was a little bit autocratic in his reaction. When he was speaking he’d gesticulate a bit, he liked to perform a point. But you never knew when he was going to shrivel up. He repeatedly said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t know—I don’t claim to be an authority on things like that.’ Of course, he did claim to be an authority. He would expatiate for endless periods about something when he got under way, and you could tell he thought he was pretty good. But if you said, ‘Well, of course, Bill, you know much more about this than I do—’ he’d say, ‘Oh, not necessarily, not necessarily!’ He thought he was being modest, but in many respects he floored you with his erudition, even when he was trying to curb it. The Indian prehistory is what most impressed me, and everybody; along with his profound geographical knowledge and his mastery of tongues. You wondered where he found this information. I didn’t know right away he’d been a prodigy. When I asked Sharfman about it, he just said, ‘Oh, you don’t know that fellow. I’m telling you, Paul—that is the greatest brain in the United States.’ William never went alone to visit Saunders, he always accompanied Sharfman. On a few occasions Sharfman, who was having an affair with a married woman, used Saunders’s bedroom, leaving Sidis and Saunders in the library. “Sidis never commented, never said a word about what they were doing in there,” said Saunders. “And I found it a bit uncomfortable without Sharfman. Sidis was a bit awkward, and he’d relapse into silence, sipping his tea. I can see him now—he used to sit with one arm over the back of the settee, sipping his cup of black tea. He would get up occasionally and go over to the bookcase and take a book out, and ask me about it. Then he would take out another. I’m one of the few people who has a complete twenty-volume Golden Bough. He’d take a book like that, and he’d know where to turn to. He’d turn some pages and say, ‘Did you ever hear of this phenomena?’ And for a moment he’d be the pedant. Then he’d relapse into his modesty again. I think he thought of my place in a vague way as a haven of refuge, since all the walls were surrounded by books.” Many of the friends who visited Paul Saunders were leftists. As he put it, “Everybody was Marxist then, but I never thought of Sidis as a Marxist. I never was one, but my Marxist friends used to come and have all-night sessions in my place, right under a big picture of George the Fifth! I knew Sidis was a pacifist. But of course Sharfman, who was Jewish, was absolutely for the war, and they argued about it. [Sidis, of course, was also Jewish.] Sidis’s attitude was, ‘It need never have happened…. If there hadn’t been such decay in society, the war wouldn’t have arisen.’ In other words, he didn’t argue that we should try and stop it, he went back further than that—Hitler shouldn’t have existed. A lot of pacifists then were secretly pro-German—I never got that impression from Sidis, I just thought he was a very, very pacifist sort of person. I don’t mean he thought Nazis shouldn’t be stopped, but he thought there were complications and ramifications that took place years and years before that made this terrible war possible. He was concerned with what had happened before.” William’s historical perspective toward the war upset a number of his friends. Helena was also upset, since she believed in all-out war against the Nazis. They had their only real falling-out over this issue. Still, Helena was convinced that her brother’s sympathies lay with the Allies. She explained, “Although Billy always claimed to be ‘neutral,’ he was like the Quakers during the Revolutionary War—one knew where his sympathies lay. He favored England, and after the fall of France he sent me this joke: “Two Germans met in Paris. Said Karl to Fritz: ‘Have you a good job here?’ “ ‘Yes, I have a fine job. I sit on the Eiffel Tower and wait for the English to wave the white flag,’ said Fritz. “ ‘Good pay?’ asked Karl. ‘Not much,’ Fritz answered, ‘but it’s for life.’ ” According to William’s theory of geographical / political continuity, a people tended to repeat its political history over and over again. For example, the Russians replaced their Tsar with brutal Communist dictators; Americans continually strove for the proud democracy that was their first form of government; and the Nazis were another manifestation of the evil Kaiser’s reign. Back in 1936, on the November 4 that saw Roosevelt reelected to a second term, William had written to Julius Eichel, “You seem to be wondering about what the remedy is for the troubles across the sea. I am afraid that, first, I have no remedies ready at hand for anything, though I think I have a vague idea as to how to strike out in the case of America; second, there probably is no remedy ‘over there’ and the best thing we here can do is simply write off the so-called European civilization as a total loss and proceed to take care of our own troubles. And it won’t be through governmental channels, so that yesterday’s returns, for example, is a highly irrelevant matter, and the political campaign is simply a circus we like to have every so often. (As a circus, it wasn’t so bad.)” If being a conscientious objector during World War I had been radical and dangerous, it was considered even more un-American during World War II. William had been classified 1-A for a time, and was eventually reclassified 4-F, though it is not known why. Perhaps it was his high blood pressure and/or weight. Thus, while he was free from the onus and risk of being a draft dodger, he was a part of the very small American minority to oppose United States involvement in the Second World War. William’s political activities had already attracted the attention of the FBI. In 1940, one of the bureau’s agents—who remains anonymous under the Freedom of Information Act—wrote two letters to Bureau Chief J. Edgar Hoover describing his meetings with “Peridromophilists,” whom he believed to be dangerous radicals. He wrote, “There is a new group… the ‘Boston Metropolitan Transfer Group’ and the leader of that outfit has been arrested for several various picketing and communistic disorderly conduct charges. His name, or one of them, is ‘William Sidis’ but he has others also. He is not associated with the Peridromophilists which I know, though he is trying to win them over.” In his second letter, three months later, the informer had discovered William’s alias of Parker Greene. “I checked the article in The New Yorker,” he wrote, “and he is therein written up as a most ‘promising’ ‘Red.’ “Though William’s wartime antidraft activities were far more radical than his transfer-collecting activities, the FBI made no further inquiries. Despite the enormous amount of time and attention William gave to his pacifist activities, they were still being juggled along with a multi-tude of projects, not the least of which was the lawsuit against The New Yorker. In 1939, William wrote a letter to Eichel grumbling that his case was withering for lack of proper attention from his lawyers, and inquiring whether Eichel could help him find new counsel. The case took several disappointing turns. William wanted a jury trial, but was unable to secure one. In 1943 his lawyers made an unsuccessful effort to keep the “right of privacy” issue alive by pointing out that Sidis was an infant when his life in the public eye began, and consequently could not have waived his right of privacy; nor had he, as an infant, ever sought publicity. When this tactic failed, William had no recourse but to press his suit for libel alone. Once again William changed attorneys, employing Hobart S. Bird, who had served him in the past by assisting with his applications for the perpetual-calendar patent. On the defendants’ side Harriet F. Pilpel, a member of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, took over the day-to-day work on the case, for Morris Ernst. Bird and Pilpel threw themselves into a hearty and time-consuming exchange of insulting red tape, and matters heated up once again. Pilpel observed that more than five years had elapsed since Sidis served his original complaint, during which time the case had “had a complicated and busy history.” Why, she asked, had Sidis waited so long to press the issue of falsity in The New Yorker article? Furthermore, she objected that he had done so “in the broadest possible terms, despite the fact that obviously a great many of the hundreds of statements about him must be true.” Bird answered irately, “Must be true! Indeed! Unless publication in The New Yorker makes it ipso facto true, there is no warrant whatever for assuming that there is any single statement in the article that is obviously true.” Much debate followed over whose job it was to detail the libelous portions of the article, the responsibility falling finally to the prosecution. Sidis, said Bird, was the victim of The New Yorker, which injured him “without justifiable motives or good ends and with a reckless and careless disregard of the plaintiff’s reputation and feelings.” In short, he stated, the magazine had libeled him by causing the readers of The New Yorker to believe the following statements to be true of the plaintiff: Was a reprehensible character; Disloyal to his country; A supporter of enemies of his country; An insulter of the American flag; A criminal; A fugitive from justice; A loathsome and filthy person in his personal habits; Of having suffered a mental breakdown; Of being afflicted with phobias; Of being a neurotic person and having a deranged mind and having received treatment as such; As one pretending extraordinary intellectual attainments and being a genius, yet in fact a fool, incapable of making a decent living and living in misery and poverty. The New Yorker published its article with “evil design and wanton cruelty,” wrote Bird hotly, leaving Sidis “greatly mortified and humiliated” and having “suffered greatly in his peace of mind and sense of dignity.” To what extent these briefs were written by Bird, and to what extent by William, will never be known. William probably did prepare much of the material, since he was so deeply dedicated to the case. When the Boston Transcript went out of business, he obtained the morgue file on himself through an employee and gave it to his attorney, to dispute The New Yorker’s defense that they had obtained their information from accurate newspaper articles. When the case ended, William insisted upon having the morgue material returned to him, and he destroyed the entire file. On March 24, 1944, the case was put on the calendar for trial. On April 3 and 4 of 1944, William was called to the office of Morris Ernst, who represented The New Yorker, and was asked to give his depositions. Ernst was one of the most respected attorneys in America; he had become famous a decade earlier by defeating the U.S. Customs Office’s ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Now Ernst personally undertook the confrontation with William Sidis. To the astonishment of his friends, William purchased a new suit for the occasion. These depositions are not among the records of the case in the Federal Court files, but were found among the papers of William’s lawyer, Hobart S. Bird, by his daughter Caroline Bird Menuez. Mrs. Menuez made some efforts to publish a sensational article about William after his death, and used the vividly colorful depositions as the meat of her essay. Because it is the only source extant for these transcripts, it is not certain that her reconstruction of the conversation between Ernst and Sidis is 100 percent accurate. Nonetheless, William’s statements have a ring of truth about them, and one can easily imagine him taking part in the following extraordinary exchange. Mrs. Menuez wrote that William went to the meeting with the intention of proving that he was just “an ordinary person” and not a genius; nor had he ever been one. He denied all allegations of extraordinary achievement, and pointed out that he had graduated from Harvard cum laude, not magna cum laude. According to Menuez, Ernst and the rest of the examiners had “a pack of papers and photostats of his record a foot high on the table, and they began questioning him about the facts contained therein.” They first asked him if he spoke any foreign languages, to which he replied no. Aware that he currently held a job as a translator, the lawyers asked William what his present employment was. He replied, “Translating.” “What languages?” they inquired. “French?” “Yes.” “German?” “Yes.” “Spanish?” “Yes.” “Russian?” “Yes.” “Italian?” “Yes.” “Portuguese?” “Yes.” “What do you mean by saying that you don’t speak any foreign languages?” “I don’t speak them, I read some of them.” “Didn’t you write a book when you were a child, entitled The Animate and the Inanimate?” “I don’t remember.” Ernst turned to a page of the book, pointed, and said, “Isn’t that a mathematical formula?” “I don’t know what a mathematical formula is.” “Did you write that?” “If I did, I didn’t know what I was talking about.” “Does a mathematical formula make you sick as alleged in the article?” “No.” “Well, what is the fourth dimension, anyway?” “All I know about it is what I’ve read in the newspapers. The newspapers at one time said it was spiritualism, then later they said it was mathematics. I don’t know anything about it. People who do say it’s not an abstruse subject.” “Did you ever attend Tufts College?” “No.” In answering a question, William made a slight grammatical error, and Ernst asked, “Do you want to correct your grammar, Mr. Sidis?” “No,” William replied, “I prefer to speak American.” Turning to the topic of his early childhood, Ernst asked him how long he stayed in the Brookline elementary school. “About three months.” “Why did you leave?” “I was kicked out.” “Why?” “I was never able to find out.” “Did you have any trouble with the teachers or students?” “No.” “Did they say you were incorrigible?” “No.” “What studies did you take?” “Just the ordinary things they take in school.” “Then did you go into the Brookline High School there?” “Yes.” “How long did you stay there?” “Well, perhaps a year.” “Why did you leave?” “I was kicked out.” “What for?” “I was never able to find out.” “Did you ever translate the Iliad from Greek into English?” “No.” “Did you ever read the Iliad?” “I may have looked at it.” “In what language did you read it?” “I don’t remember.” William was then handed a two-page typewritten account of some episodes from his childhood and asked to read it carefully. He took a quick glance at it, and returned it to the interrogator. “Have you read it?” he was asked. “I have looked at it.” The interrogator began to read from the paper, when William interrupted, “Hold on, it doesn’t say that”—the interrogator had made a slight error. The questions continued. “Did you ever study mathematics?” “I never studied anything.” William replied truthfully. Ernst was discouraged by the depositions. Clearly, William was willing to fight tooth and nail to prove that he was ordinary, and would do so in front of a jury. Such a battle, fought by so great a genius, would be bitter. The New Yorker had no desire to allow the libel portion of the suit to go to trial. Rather than proceed, they offered William a settlement out of court. William accepted. Consequently, wrote Menuez, the deposition was never filed. There is no record of the sum; friends believe it was between five and six hundred dollars. James Thurber wrote: “The libel charge, at first held in abeyance, was decided as late as 1944, in favor of Sidis. The judgment was small, for the libel, whatever it was, had been a minor slip and not intentional denigration.” The New Yorker considered that it had won, naturally regarding this tiny payment for libel as negligible. But William was jubilant. He had fought on and on, and caring little for money, had won at last on a matter of principle. For William had been libeled from birth—he had been libeled for forty-six years. From the age of fifteen, he had run from the sensation-mongering press; and, finally making his stand, he had won. A meaningless victory to the rest of the world, but a great triumph for William James Sidis. Margaret McGill saw William for the last time a few days later. He arrived to teach his history class wearing his new suit, to the delight of his friends. William, who had never spoken a word to them about his past or his life, told the group all about the article and the lawsuit, explaining point by point the manner in which he had been libeled. William did not regard the issues of libel and invasion of privacy as separate. He wrote to Eichel on April 10, “I got a settlement from The New Yorker of the seven-year lawsuit I had pending against them. I feel that it was at last some sort of victory in my long fight against the principle of personal publicity.” According to Caroline Menuez, when William went to New York to receive his settlement, Morris Ernst invited Sidis and Bird into his office for a few words. Said Ernst, “If you should come to New York at any time, come in to see me. And if you ever need any money, come to me, and I’ll give it to you without any obligation. I’m a rich son of a bitch, and I’d just like to give my money to a fellow like you.” William’s exact reply to this distasteful speech is unrecorded, but it must have been negative, for it prompted Ernst to say, “I’ll give you one thousand dollars right now for any article you write of any length on any subject. You will not have to use your own name. I will not disclose the fact that you are the author.” William refused. “But why?” pressed Ernst. “Because I wouldn’t trust you,” replied Sidis. When William left, Ernst grumbled to Hobart Bird, “He’s a sick boy. 20 A Superior Spirit By the standards of Morris Ernst and those of most of the people the world deems successful, William James Sidis, the most intelligent human being alive and a twenty-dollar-a-week comptometer operator, was “a very sick boy.” Certainly he was a very eccentric, and in many ways a neurotic, man. But at the core of his mind he was remarkably healthy and strong. “There is no question about it,” said Bill Rab. “It’s a wonder he could bear up all those years, under the forces of exile … his self-imposed exile.” In a literal sense, however, one that neither Ernst nor anyone in William’s life was aware of, he was a very sick man. By 1944, William’s debilitating blood pressure had been worsening steadily for at least a decade. The outward manifestations were few. He had become exceedingly overweight, yet Helena described her brother as “pink and laughing.” He had occasional difficulty breathing, especially when climbing stairs. According to Julius Eichel, William’s room in a Shailer Street rooming house was “an attic which was very cold in winter.” Consequently he caught a cold in the winter of 1943 and never quite shook it off. Since William had won a settlement of at least five hundred dollars in April 1944, it is strange that he did not leave the rooming house for more healthful lodgings. On the other hand, it may have been a matter of pride. Though reporters had hounded him since he began suing The New Yorker, he no longer cared to run from them by changing residences. Or it may simply have been a matter of indifference, since he was so little concerned with bodily comfort. The five hundred dollars was a substantial enough sum in 1944 to have freed him from the necessity of working, at least for a time. Exactly one year before the settlement—in April 1943—he had writ-ten to Eichel, “My economic situation is probably in the worst spot it has ever been. It is beginning to look as though I will not be able to keep myself alive for much longer—barring some miracle, which I hardly expect.” Since then, he had had several jobs. Even after winning the five hundred dollars he continued to work—his last position was at an actuarial research company, operating a comptometer. When the job was finished, he promptly sought another. In July 1944, he was hired for a job with a small chain of low-priced department stores, and was to begin Monday, July 17. Early in July, he ran into Shirley Smith on the street and she asked him how he was. He answered in some detail, explaining that he felt a bit unwell; Shirley teased him, saying, “You know, William, when people ask you how you are, they don’t want to hear the details.” He taught his regular history group a few days later. On July 13, just after he had finished his dinner, one of the boarders in the rooming house heard a thud in the hallway. Rushing upstairs, the landlady and her son found William unconscious. Unable to revive him, they called the police, who rushed William to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in an ambulance. William had suffered a stroke, the result of high blood pressure; it was a cerebral hemorrhage, the same type of stroke that had ended Boris Sidis’s life. That night, the Boston Traveler carried a front-page story: “One-Time Child Prodigy Found Destitute Here.” They reported that William was in a coma, and the hospital described him as “fairly comfortable.” Because the hospital was short of rooms, William’s bed was placed in a curtained-off section of hallway. William’s landlady did not know any of his friends or relatives and had no idea whom to contact. Searching William’s effects, the police discovered that he had an aunt in Boston, whom they eventually notified. All his friends and his closest family members had the horrible experience of finding out what had happened by reading about it in the papers. Helena, recently returned from the hospital after a serious operation, was living in a subleased apartment in the Bronx, and Sarah had come up from Miami to be with her. The apartment had no telephone and they didn’t take any newspapers, so they did not learn about William’s condition until a friend of the family brought them a newspaper the next day. Sarah and Helena rushed up to Boston. Meanwhile, a number of people had already converged on the hospital. Ann Feinzig visited William, and Rose Hirshfield, a friend and coworker, stayed at his bedside. H. Addington Bruce, who had known William since birth, also saw the story. Bruce had written a great many articles about prodigies, and in the early forties mentioned William in one of them. William had been furious and had told him off harshly. Bruce hadn’t held the incident against William, whom he regarded as practically his own son. Bruce rushed to the hospital, for some reason certain that despite the reports, William was not in a coma. At the bedside, he took William’s hand and said, “Billy, this is Mr. Bruce. If you understand me, if you know me, squeeze my hand three times.” William squeezed twice, and then his hand fell away, as if he hadn’t the strength to press a third time. Bruce told the hospital staff to send him the bills, if they could not locate any relatives. According to Helena, William was not actually in a coma; rather, the stroke robbed him of his power of speech, and the newspapers reported it incorrectly. Because he was not unconscious, Sarah was afraid to enter his room. She told Helena, “He may see me and have another attack.” Said Helena, “It was so sad. We were very anxious to avoid any sort of excitement, so she stood outside his door. But she was afraid to go in the room, because she was afraid he was going to get excited. She still wanted to right the wrong, but she just couldn’t.” While Sarah sat her lonely vigil in the hallway, Helena and Rose sat at William’s bedside. By now, several newspapers had circulated the story. Between reporters and friends, the hospital was deluged with phone calls. Said Shirley Smith, “I always felt very sorry that I did not go to see him in the hospital. The news came out in the evening paper, and I thought, ‘Oh, I ought to go!’ And there was a tremendous thunderstorm, so I thought, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ And there was no tomorrow.” William died on July 17, 1944, of a cerebral hemorrhage leading to pneumonia. Anxious to avoid the presence of the gaping press, Sarah hastily arranged the funeral, which was held at Portsmouth the following day. She allowed only a handful of friends and relatives to attend. William was buried next to his father at Harmony Grove cemetery in Portsmouth. Sarah and Helena, joined by a few relatives, went to the Shailer Street apartment to clean up William’s effects. Helena found a letter addressed to her, full of the latest batch of jokes and clippings from the Boston Globe. There were few possessions, but there were stacks and stacks of research materials and unpublished manuscripts and articles. There were piles of transit guides covering forty major cities, and several thousand transfers, the first one dating from 1903, when William was five years old. They found the patent for the perpetual calendar, a small book of transfer photographs, sheaves of correspondence, an assortment of maps drawn by William, the Gregg Shorthand Dictionary, a Russian/English dictionary, the Pickwick Papers and a play by Moliere (both in Russian), a Guide to American Esperanto, a copy of the U.S. Constitution—and, curiously, William James Sidis’s Harvard degree, which he had saved for thirty years. William did not leave a will. At only forty-six years of age, he probably had little inkling that he would need one. However, he did wish Helena to be executrix of his estate, such as it was. She discovered that her brother’s bankbook contained $652.81. The day of his death he was to have begun a menial job at a department store—yet the entire sum of his settlement from The New Yorker had been left untouched. Perhaps the money was tucked away for a rainy day. Or, more likely, William enjoyed knowing it was there, whole, the symbol of his fight and his victory. After expenses—$211 to the funeral director, $50 to the monument company, $12 in unpaid rent, $67 in hospital bills, and $112 in legal fees—Helena was left with $200. Sarah had paid the funeral and hospital bills; but, wealthy as she was, she demanded to be repaid out of her son’s account, rather than allow Helena to keep the extra $200. This distasteful action was only the first of several that Sarah
3would perpetrate. Many, many times during her son’s life she had been accused of exploiting him in his childhood. She made an even greater effort to exploit him in death. However, it was several years before Sarah’s efforts got fully under way. The press had its day immediately. William’s obituaries were an orgy of reveling in his supposed failed life. Most of them contained a high proportion of factual errors, and all harped on the following point, as it appeared on the front page of The New York Times: “Acquaintances often said he never enjoyed childhood and had no conception of play or pleasure.” Every obituary stated that his only published writing was Notes on the Collection of Transfers—not a single one referred to The Animate and the Inanimate. The New Yorker piece was the primary reference source for the obituaries and editorials that appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide; consequently, the story of William’s childhood nervous breakdown was repeated in every article. Writers theorized ineptly about the cause of William’s decay. A New York Times editorialist wrote, “Perhaps his brain was tired and his interest dulled by long excessive stress on his intellectuals [sic].” Psychiatrists were quoted. The Boston Traveler interviewed Professor Wayland F. Vaughan of the Boston University psychology department, who supposed that William’s spectacular decline occurred because “he never had time to whittle a willow or dam up the gutter with painstakingly collected stones and twigs. He was always busy with books…. He was obviously a child who never had any fun.” Parents who had a prodigy on their hands, advised Professor Vaughan, should seek the testing guidance given by Yale’s Professor Gesell, who had developed a system for monitoring the progress of gifted children, in order to “guide parents and teachers in controlling the safe rate of progress for any young genius.” Concluded the Boston Traveler, “How to treat a genius need worry only about 1% of the nation’s parents because 90% of the population never will give evidence of sufficient brilliance to inspire anyone to push them ahead.” The attitude of virtually every article can best be summed up by these words that concluded an editorial: “So I guess it doesn’t pay to be too smart, either.” Both Time and Newsweek devoted several pages each to William’s obituary, and both overflowed with factual errors. Time’s article was titled “Prodigious Failure” and Newsweek’s was “Burned-Out Prodigy.” Both contained every myth and bromide imaginable that pertained to William. Newsweek featured quotes that made William sound especially cretinous; for example, “A year ago Sidis went to work for the Financial Publishing Co. of Boston for $22 a week. ‘Gee,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s big money for me.’ ” According to Newsweek, “The record of Sidis’s later doings is sketchy. His single published work, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, appeared in 1926. Acquaintances report that he discoursed occasionally on American Indian dialects. Later in life he went to the movies and liked to hang around and talk.” William’s friends fought back. Shirley Smith wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Traveler: His numerous friends do not like the false newspaper picture of him as a pauper and anti-social recluse…. Bill Sidis paid his way; he was not a burden on society.. Sidis had plenty of loyal friends. All of them found his ideas stimulating and his personality likable. Very few people knew as much about the Indian background of our social customs as he. His manuscript study of it is worthy textbook material and very readable. He knew dozens of stories from Boston’s history and told them with relish. He recently submitted a plan for post-war Boston. But William Sidis had one great cause—the right of an individual in this country to follow his chosen way of life… Whenever Sidis saw interference, by individuals or governments, with anyone’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he fought it any way he could. He won a legal fight against a nationally known publication on the ground that it had invaded his privacy. Bill Sidis was a quiet man who enjoyed the normal things of life. His friends respected him and enjoyed his company. I am glad to have been one of his friends. William Aronoff, an attorney who had represented William, wrote a particularly interesting letter, which he sent to several publications. Its curiosity lay in the fact that it contained a number of well-intentioned but utterly false statements about William’s life (along with many accurate ones), which William had evidently convinced Aronoff were true. Some of them were very farfetched indeed, and William must have made them at the height of his struggle for anonymity. A portion of the letter read: He was not a mathematical genius, nor any other type of genius or “prodigy” in spite of so many allegations to the contrary. He never lectured to any group of professors on the 4th dimension and never knew of any theory as the 4th dimension.… He always wanted to be a lawyer, contrary to the wishes of his parents; and in fact spent two years at Harvard Law School, during all of which time they wanted him to study medicine. His later desire to work as an office clerk rather than at any other vocation was based upon his physical inability to do any manual labor, and general inability to get and maintain any more lucrative position because of the “prodigy” publicity that hounded him for so many years. Mr. Sidis was in my office about twenty-four hours before he was taken suddenly ill.… He was just as sincere, respectful, courteous and normal at that time as he had always been. He never engaged in any riot or incited others to riot.… It is to the shame of certain publications, which continuously published the fact that he had been sentenced, but ignorantly or conveniently neglected to mention the subsequent nol pros. He was] an individual who lived a decent life in a decent manner, in spite of all the handicaps that were put in his way from the time of his early childhood. When he heard about William’s death, Creighton Hill wrote to Margaret McGill: “There are real tears very close to my eyes as I write this note.… Bill was a gentleman and something very gracious and kind and lovely was in him. And now, we shall never see those marvelous mannerisms and gestures again…. I’m sure Bill doesn’t like the way the government is run, wherever he may be right now. In whatever Valhalla of superior spirits he is abiding, he is unquestionably in the opposition.” Articles about William have continued to pop up in books and magazines to this day. By 1959, the facts of his life had become so distorted that in the book Stranger Than Science one could read about the four-year-old prodigy composing French treatises “under orders from his father,” and concluding the Harvard Math Club lecture and turning from the lectern “giggling hysterically and uncontrollably.” One could also learn that “he was permitted no playmates. His world was a prefabricated playhouse of the abstruse. Month by month his incredible development continued, to the amazement of his father’s colleagues and to the bewilderment of his helpless mother.” The article concluded, “To the bitter end, genius William Sidis refused to touch the money of the parent who had ruined his mind.” As a result of such articles, modern psychologists now refer to the Sidis fallacy—that pushing gifted youngsters may have adverse consequences. Sadly, the Sidis fallacy has given a bad name to the idea of tending to the special needs of bright children. Sarah Sidis lived fifteen more years, dying on July 9, 1959, at the age of eighty-four. She was buried at Portsmouth beside her husband and son. Her obituary was minor national news; The New York Times referred to her as “a noted psychiatrist,” though she had never practiced medicine or psychiatry on a single patient. During the fifteen years that followed William’s death, Sarah never gave up the ghost. In various editions she wrote and rewrote three books: her autobiography, The Sidis Story; and two books about raising children, Formula for Genius and How to Make Your Child a Genius. None of them was finished or published in any form. She persistently rewrote the first chapters of her life story, the ones that told the tale of her youth in Russia, her marriage to Boris, and the story of William’s singular childhood. Among her effects was found the projected table of contents for the book, which was to consist of fifteen chapters. She never got past the first few pages of chapter 10, “Billy Rebels,” preferring instead to repeatedly pen glowing accounts of her son’s successes, dwelling on his infancy, his years in the limelight, and his startling accomplishments. Sarah’s ability to avoid the bitterness of the truth is amazing. Had she completed the proposed chapter 12, “Billy’s Later Years,” what would it have contained? How could she have explained for public consumption the gargantuan rift between herself and her precious wunderkind? In the late 1940s, Sarah’s personal secretary, Paula Bloom, wrote in her diary, “Dr. Sidis lives for nothing except the book.… She has no idea about her poor memory and everyone treats her with the greatest of respect.… Nephew Ben talked with Sarah about the book almost the entire day and she really kept him from his own work, interrupting him every few minutes with new ideas.” In fact, Sarah had a second obsession—the founding of a “Boris Sidis Institute,” an educational institution that would teach children the “Sidis method” (nebulous as it was) and would instruct teachers in this method. Sarah wanted to found the institute at the University of Miami. She appealed to various wealthy friends and acquaintances —such as Herbert Kalmus and Howard Hughes—for donations, but she did not succeed in raising a substantial sum of money. In 1949, Sarah received an audience with Eleanor Roosevelt, which she used to promote her plan for the institute. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote about their conversation in her syndicated column “My Day,” but still nothing materialized in the way of funding. In 1952, Sarah’s ideas were the subject of a lengthy article, “You Can Make Your Child a Genius,” which was nationally syndicated. Quoted in the article, Sarah bragged about William’s youthful accomplishments, yet said little about his adult life. She offered parents a list of eight pieces of advice about raising geniuses: Avoid punishment in all ways possible—it is the first cause of fear. Try not to say “Don’t.” Instead, explain why what you say is so. Awaken curiosity—it is the key to learning. Never fail to answer and never put off your child’s questions. Never force your child to learn nor judge his ability to learn by adult standards. Implant ideas at bedtime, just before sleep. Suggestions made then will make a solid impression. Never lie to your child or use evasions. Refrain from showing him off. “What happened to Billy can happen to your Johnny too,” said Sarah. When Norbert Wiener read the article, he was horrified. He wrote angrily in his autobiography: As a piece of reporting, it is an ordinary journalistic hack job, neither better nor worse than a thousand others that appear in the Sunday supplements and the slicks. As a human document, it scarcely merits consideration. Sidis’s failure was in large measure the failure of his parents.… So you can make your child a genius, can you? Yes, as you can make a blank canvas into a painting by Leonardo or a ream of clean paper into a play by Shakespeare. My father could give me only what my father had: his sincerity, his brilliance, his learning, and his passion. These qualities are not to be picked up on every street corner. Galatea needs a Pygmalion. What does the sculptor do except remove the surplus marble from the block, and make the figure come to life with his own brain and out of his own love? … Let those who choose to carve a human soul to their own measure be sure that they have a worthy image after which to carve it, and let them know that the power of molding an emerging intellect is a power of death as well as a power of life. EPILOGUE There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind … refusing to bring it into a world he despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found—they are on strike, on strike against unreason … in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous … as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love. -AYN RAND, Atlas Shrugged What was wrong with William James Sidis? Said Ann Feinzig, “I don’t know what happened to Bill. People who loved him, like my father, were always fighting someone who had no knowledge of Bill, to defend him. But it isn’t quite true that nothing happened to him. If no one knew anything about Bill Sidis at all and he walked into a room he would be eccentric at least. And if he still really had all his childhood abilities, and I don’t doubt that he did, then something terrible happened to him emotionally.” The answer to the question can be found by first discarding the swamp of myths and lies that surrounds the memory of America’s greatest prodigy. Author Abraham Sperling, director of New York City’s Aptitude Testing Institute, became deeply interested in Sidis in the period immediately following his death. Sperling had been testing intelligence quotients since the 1930s, and was startled to see the obituaries that proclaimed Sidis a burnout. Said Sperling, “My knowledge told me that this was completely erroneous. I learned, much to my satisfaction, that there’s no evidence that his intellect had burned out. This business of a nervous breakdown was nonsense. “In recent years, I have tested more than five thousand people. Of all the mentally superior individuals that I have seen, nobody begins to approach the intellect and perspicacity of William Sidis. According to my computations, he easily had an IQ between 250 and 300. [Albert Einstein’s IQ was 200, and John Stuart Mill’s was estimated to be 190.] I have never heard of the existence of anybody with such an IQ. I would honestly say that he was the most prodigious intellect of our entire generation. And he did not burn out.” No, the intellect did not burn out, but its owner took it underground. The double life of William James Sidis was based on a mixture of righteousness and fear. The portion of fear is highly ironic, and terribly sad, for above all else, in books, lectures, and interviews, Boris and Sarah Sidis inveighed against fear, against the tragedy of a frightened child. They failed to see that their own son was, indeed, afraid. And had the adult William been emotionally capable of applying even a portion of his intelligence to the study of his own psychology, how different his life might have been! Where, precisely, did his parents fail him? Though the mythmakers have held Boris and Sarah’s child-rearing methods at fault, there is in fact nothing to fault in them. Upon the closest inspection, they are similar to the basic, sensible techniques popularized by the brilliant educator Maria Montessori. William James Sidis was not pushed, he was taught to reason. He did not merely conquer forty languages, or one hundred—he had the mental technology to grasp any language, no matter how difficult, in a day. His was not a genius of mere retentive ability—it was that of a magnificent reasoning machine. Boris and Sarah did not create his high IQ through training—their genes provided the better part of it—but their training nurtured and encouraged in a superb manner the rare plant they had borne. Their failure lay in the painful emotional environment created by the degeneration of their marriage, the criticizing domination Sarah Sidis exercised as William approached adolescence, and the fact that although she advised other parents against it, Sarah did show William off. The other factor that damaged William, perhaps the most important one of all, was his parents’ inability to shield him from the merciless envy of the public and its vicious desire to resent and cripple greatness and reduce it to normalcy and mediocrity. While it is not easy to explain to a child, however brilliant he may be, that he will be hated for the very reason that he is brilliant—the job must be done, and it must be done well. The child must be taught, in no uncertain terms, that his own standards, carefully reasoned out, are the only standards he must live by, and that he must courageously disregard all public standards. This was not an instruction that William Sidis received clearly. Rather than teach William how and why to ignore his cruel detractors, Boris and Sarah concentrated all their attention on reforming the educators of the world. Not a poor mission, but hardly worthwhile at the expense of their son’s self-confidence. Boris, blind to the urgency of this matter, made several grave mistakes. He advised William how to manipulate reporters, rather than shielding him from them as much as possible; and he permitted himself to publish a book, Philistine and Genius, that drew enormous attention to a child with an already insufficient coat of protective armor. In 1957, Norbert Wiener wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine entitled “Analysis of the Child Prodigy.” It was the era of the highly popular television stars the Quiz Kids, and the question of the proper treatment of brilliant children was strongly on the minds of millions of viewers. Wiener, speaking from the other side —as one who had been a child prodigy himself—disapproved of the television show. He urged Americans to emulate European education, where “there is much less pressure on the bright youngster to keep in lockstep with the average and below-average student, who is the darling of our American educational system.” In Europe, he wrote, brilliant children were encouraged to blossom early and inconspicuously, well out of the public eye. He continued sagely: One thing is necessarily true of the precocious child, in so far as he is not intrinsically one-sided and a freak. He is brought up against the contradictions of the world outside him at a time when he has not begun to develop the hard shell of the adult. He finds soon enough that the copybook maxims of life are in many cases an oversimplification or a deliberate falsification of what he sees in the world about him. This hurts him deeply at a time when his defenses are not yet developed. He thus is more bare of protection either than the average child or than the adult and can be badly hurt. Without an understanding and sympathetic environment he can easily come to grief. It is the duty of his parents and counselors, if they really wish to give him a chance to come into his own, to shelter him during this difficult stage when he is neither the one thing nor the other. This is the time in which exploitation by the press or the radio may do him great harm, as may also the fact that he is growing up in a society which loves conformity and has little sympathy for inner achievement. It will not do merely to protect him from the realities of life nor to make believe that society really wants his sort of person, but he must be given a fair chance to develop a reasonable thick skin against the pressures which will certainly be made on him and a confidence that somewhere in the world he has his own function which he may reasonably hope to fulfill. It has been suggested by many writers and commentators that William James Sidis, in not living up to any of the goals predicted for him in his youth, betrayed society. This is not so—Sidis owed no debt to humanity. Nor did society betray Sidis. But its many members who inspired the retreat of an intellect of Sidis’s magnitude unwittingly worked against society’s best interests. Sidis may have found his own path to happiness, but at what cost to the world? How many Einsteins and Galileos has the world lost by treating prodigies as unwelcome freaks in their youth? What mountains might William James Sidis have moved, had he not been stunned into hiding by the public’s mockery of his eccentricities and achievements? Let us hope that in the future all gifted, exceptional children will grow up in a world that instead of shunning them as oddities, will welcome and nurture their talents, their achievements, and their vision.